十周年

Tenth Anniversary

游戏设计艺术

The Art of Game Design

镜头之书

A Book of Lenses

第三版

3rd Edition

十周年

Tenth Anniversary

游戏设计艺术

The Art of Game Design

镜头之书

A Book of Lenses

第三版

3rd Edition

杰西·谢尔

Jesse Schell

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CRC出版社

CRC Press

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Taylor & Francis Group

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美国国会图书馆出版品目錄數據

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

姓名:Schell,Jesse,作家。

Names: Schell, Jesse, author.

书名:游戏设计的艺术:一本镜头书/杰西·谢尔(Jesse Schell)。

Title: The art of game design : a book of lenses / Jesse Schell.

描述:第三版。| 博卡拉顿:Taylor & Francis,CRC 标题,

Description: Third edition. | Boca Raton : Taylor & Francis, a CRC title,

隶属于 Taylor & Francis 品牌,是 Taylor & Francis 旗下成员

part of the Taylor & Francis imprint, a member of the Taylor & Francis

集团是 T&F Informa, plc 的学术部门,2019 年。| 包括

Group, the academic division of T&F Informa, plc, 2019. | Includes

参考书目和索引。

bibliographical references and index.

标识符:LCCN 2019013713 | ISBN 9781138632059(平装:无酸纸)|

Identifiers: LCCN 2019013713 | ISBN 9781138632059 (pbk. : acid-free paper) |

ISBN 9781138632097(精装:无酸纸)

ISBN 9781138632097 (hardback : acid-free paper)

主题:LCSH:电脑游戏——设计。

Subjects: LCSH: Computer games—Design.

分类:LCC QA76.76.C672 S34 2019 | DDC 794.8/1536—dc23

Classification: LCC QA76.76.C672 S34 2019 | DDC 794.8/1536—dc23

LC 记录可在https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013713上查阅

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013713

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对于 Nyra

For Nyra

总是倾听

who always listens

内容

CONTENTS

镜头表

Table of Lenses

你好

Hello

1 太初有设计师

1 In the Beginning, There Is the Designer

魔法词

Magic Words

游戏设计师需要哪些技能?

What Skills Does a Game Designer Need?

最重要的技能

The Most Important Skill

五种倾听方式

The Five Kinds of Listening

天才的秘密

The Secret of the Gifted

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

2. 设计师创造体验

2 The Designer Creates an Experience

游戏不等于体验

The Game Is Not the Experience

这是游戏独有的吗?

Is This Unique to Games?

追逐彩虹的三种实用方法

Three Practical Approaches to Chasing Rainbows

心理学

Psychology

人类学

Anthropology

设计

Design

自省:力量、危险和实践

Introspection: Powers, Perils, and Practice

危险一:自省可能导致对现实的错误结论

Peril #1: Introspection Can Lead to False Conclusions about Reality

危险二:我的经历不一定适合别人

Peril #2: What Is True of My Experiences May Not Be True for Others

剖析你的感受

Dissect Your Feelings

击败海森堡

Defeating Heisenberg

分析记忆

Analyze Memories

两遍

Two Passes

偷看

Sneak Glances

默默观察

Observe Silently

重要经验

Essential Experience

你所感受的才是真实的

All That’s Real Is What You Feel

3. 体验发生在场地

3 The Experience Takes Place in a Venue

平台的变迁

The Shifting Sands of Platform

私人场地

Private Venues

壁炉

The Hearth

工作台

The Workbench

阅读角

The Reading Nook

公共场所

Public Venues

电影院

The Theater

竞技场

The Arena

博物馆

The Museum

半私人/半公共场所

Half Private/Half Public Venues

游戏桌

The Gaming Table

操场

The Playground

任何地方

Anywhere

混合和搭配场地

Venues Mixed and Matched

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

4.游戏带来的体验

4 The Experience Rises Out of a Game

关于定义的咆哮

A Rant about Definitions

那么,什么是游戏?

So What Is a Game?

不,说真的,什么是游戏?

No, Seriously, What Is a Game?

问题解决 101

Problem Solving 101

我们的劳动成果

The Fruits of Our Labor

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

5. 游戏由各种元素组成

5 The Game Consists of Elements

小游戏是由什么组成的?

What Are Little Games Made Of?

四个基本要素

The Four Basic Elements

皮肤和骨骼

Skin and Skeleton

6 元素支撑主题

6 The Elements Support a Theme

单纯的游戏

Mere Games

统一主题

Unifying Themes

谐振

Resonance

回到现实

Back to Reality

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

7 游戏始于一个想法

7 The Game Begins with an Idea

灵感

Inspiration

陈述问题

State the Problem

如何睡觉

How to Sleep

您的沉默伙伴

Your Silent Partner

潜意识提示#1:注意

Subconscious Tip #1: Pay Attention

潜意识提示#2:记录你的想法

Subconscious Tip #2: Record Your Ideas

潜意识提示#3:明智地管理食欲

Subconscious Tip #3: Manage Its Appetites (Judiciously)

潜意识建议#4:睡眠

Subconscious Tip #4: Sleep

潜意识提示#5:不要逼得太紧

Subconscious Tip #5: Don’t Push Too Hard

个人关系

A Personal Relationship

16 个头脑风暴技巧

Sixteen Nitty-Gritty Brainstorming Tips

头脑风暴技巧#1:写下答案

Brainstorm Tip #1: The Write Answer

头脑风暴提示#2:书写还是打字?

Brainstorm Tip #2: Write or Type?

头脑风暴技巧#3:草图

Brainstorm Tip #3: Sketch

头脑风暴技巧#4:玩具

Brainstorm Tip #4: Toys

头脑风暴技巧#5:改变你的观点

Brainstorm Tip #5: Change Your Perspective

头脑风暴技巧#6:沉浸其中

Brainstorm Tip #6: Immerse Yourself

头脑风暴技巧#7:开玩笑

Brainstorm Tip #7: Crack Jokes

头脑风暴技巧#8:不惜一切代价

Brainstorm Tip #8: Spare No Expense

头脑风暴技巧#9:墙上的字迹

Brainstorm Tip #9: The Writing on the Wall

头脑风暴技巧#10:空间记忆

Brainstorm Tip #10: The Space Remembers

头脑风暴技巧#11:写下所有内容

Brainstorm Tip #11: Write Everything

头脑风暴技巧#12:给列表编号

Brainstorm Tip #12: Number Your Lists

头脑风暴技巧#13:打破你的假设

Brainstorm Tip #13: Destroy Your Assumptions

头脑风暴技巧#14:混合搭配类别

Brainstorm Tip #14: Mix and Match Categories

头脑风暴技巧#15:自言自语

Brainstorm Tip #15: Talk to Yourself

头脑风暴技巧#16:寻找合作伙伴

Brainstorm Tip #16: Find a Partner

看看这些想法!现在怎么办?

Look At All These Ideas! Now What?

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

8. 游戏通过迭代不断改进

8 The Game Improves through Iteration

选择一个想法

Choosing an Idea

八个过滤器

The Eight Filters

循环规则

The Rule of the Loop

软件工程简史

A Short History of Software Engineering

危险—瀑布—保持距离

Danger—Waterfall—Keep Back

巴里·博姆爱你

Barry Boehm Loves You

敏捷宣言

The Agile Manifesto

风险评估和原型设计

Risk Assessment and Prototyping

例如:泡泡镇的囚徒

Example: Prisoners of Bubbleville

泡泡城的囚徒:设计概要

Prisoners of Bubbleville: Design Brief

泡泡镇的囚徒:风险清单

Prisoners of Bubbleville: Risk List

泡沫城的囚徒:风险缓解

Prisoners of Bubbleville: Risk Mitigation

高效原型设计的十个技巧

Ten Tips for Productive Prototyping

原型设计技巧1:回答问题

Prototyping Tip #1: Answer a Question

原型设计技巧2:忘记质量

Prototyping Tip #2: Forget Quality

原型设计技巧 3:不要执着

Prototyping Tip #3: Don’t Get Attached

原型设计技巧#4:确定原型的优先级

Prototyping Tip #4: Prioritize Your Prototypes

原型设计技巧 #5:高效并行化原型

Prototyping Tip #5: Parallelize Prototypes Productively

原型设计技巧#6:不一定非要数字化

Prototyping Tip #6: It Doesn’t Have to Be Digital

俄罗斯方块:纸质原型

Tetris: A Paper Prototype

Halo:纸质原型

Halo: A Paper Prototype

原型设计技巧 7:不必具有交互性

Prototyping Tip #7: It Doesn’t Have to Be Interactive

原型设计技巧#8:选择“快速循环”游戏引擎

Prototyping Tip #8: Pick a “Fast Loop” Game Engine

原型设计技巧#9:先制作玩具

Prototyping Tip #9: Build the Toy First

原型设计技巧 #10:抓住更多循环的机会

Prototyping Tip #10: Seize Opportunities for More Loops

闭环

Closing the Loop

第 1 循环:“新赛车”游戏

Loop 1: “New Racing” Game

循环 2:“竞速潜艇”游戏

Loop 2: “Racing Subs” Game

循环 3:“飞行恐龙”游戏

Loop 3: “Flying Dinos” Game

多少才够?

How Much Is Enough?

你的秘密燃料

Your Secret Fuel

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

9.游戏是为玩家而制作的

9 The Game Is Made for a Player

爱因斯坦的小提琴

Einstein’s Violin

展现自我

Project Yourself

人口统计

Demographics

媒介是厌恶女性者吗?

The Medium Is the Misogynist?

男性喜欢在游戏中看到的五种刻板印象

Five Stereotypes about What Males Like to See in Games

女性在游戏中喜欢看到的五种刻板印象

Five Stereotypes about What Females Like to See in Games

心理统计学

Psychographics

乐芙兰的游戏乐趣分类

LeBlanc’s Taxonomy of Game Pleasures

Bartle 的玩家类型分类法

Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types

更多乐趣:更多!

More Pleasure: MORE!

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

10. 游戏体验存在于玩家的心中

10 The Experience Is in the Player’s Mind

造型

Modeling

重点

Focus

共情

Empathy

想像力

Imagination

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

11. 玩家的心态由玩家的动机所驱动

11 The Player’s Mind Is Driven by the Player’s Motivation

需要…

Needs…

…还有更多需求

…And More Needs

内在动机与外在动机

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

想要与必须

Wanna vs. Hafta

新奇

Novelty

判断

Judgment

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

12 有些元素是游戏机制

12 Some Elements Are Game Mechanics

机制 1:空间

Mechanic 1: Space

嵌套空间

Nested Spaces

零维度

Zero Dimensions

机制 2:时间

Mechanic 2: Time

离散时间与连续时间

Discrete and Continuous Time

时钟与比赛

Clocks and Races

控制时间

Controlling Time

机制 3:对象

Mechanic 3: Objects

秘密

Secrets

机制 4:行动

Mechanic 4: Actions

新兴游戏玩法

Emergent Gameplay

机制 5:规则

Mechanic 5: Rules

Parlett 规则分析

Parlett’s Rule Analysis

模式

Modes

执行者

Enforcer

欺骗性

Cheatability

最重要的规则

The Most Important Rule

总结规则

Wrapping Up Rules

机制 6:技能

Mechanic 6: Skill

真实技能与虚拟技能

Real vs. Virtual Skills

列举技能

Enumerating Skills

机制 7:机会

Mechanic 7: Chance

概率的发明

Invention of Probability

每个游戏设计师都应该知道的十条概率规则

Ten Rules of Probability Every Game Designer Should Know

规则 1:分数是小数,百分数是百分数

Rule #1: Fractions Are Decimals Are Percents

规则2:从零到一——就这样!

Rule #2: Zero to One—and That’s It!

规则 3:“期望”除以“可能的结果”等于概率

Rule #3: “Looked For” Divided By “Possible Outcomes” Equals Probability

规则4:枚举!

Rule #4: Enumerate!

规则 5:在某些情况下,OR 表示添加

Rule #5: In Certain Cases, OR Means Add

规则 6:在某些情况下,“与”表示相乘

Rule #6: In Certain Cases, AND Means Multiply

规则 7:一减“做”=“不做”

Rule #7: One Minus “Does” = “Doesn’t”

规则#8:多个线性随机选择的总和不是线性随机选择!

Rule #8: The Sum of Multiple Linear Random Selections Is NOT a Linear Random Selection!

规则9:掷骰子

Rule #9: Roll the Dice

规则 10:极客喜欢炫耀(贡博定律)

Rule #10: Geeks Love Showing Off (Gombaud’s Law)

期望值

Expected Value

认真考虑价值观

Consider Values Carefully

人为因素

The Human Element

技能和机会纠缠在一起

Skill and Chance Get Tangled

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

13 游戏机制必须保持平衡

13 Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance

十二种最常见的游戏平衡类型

The Twelve Most Common Types of Game Balance

平衡类型#1:公平

Balance Type #1: Fairness

对称游戏

Symmetrical Games

非对称游戏

Asymmetrical Games

双翼机战斗

Biplane Battle

剪刀石头布

Rock, Paper, Scissors

平衡类型#2:挑战与成功

Balance Type #2: Challenge vs. Success

平衡类型#3:有意义的选择

Balance Type #3: Meaningful Choices

三角性

Triangularity

平衡类型#4:技能与机会

Balancing Type #4: Skill vs. Chance

平衡类型#5:头部与手部

Balancing Type #5: Head vs. Hands

平衡类型#6:竞争与合作

Balance Type #6: Competition vs. Cooperation

平衡类型#7:空头与多头

Balance Type #7: Short vs. Long

平衡类型#8:奖励

Balance Type #8: Rewards

平衡类型#9:惩罚

Balance Type #9: Punishment

平衡类型#10:自由与受控体验

Balance Type #10: Freedom vs. Controlled Experience

平衡类型#11:简单与复杂

Balance Type #11: Simple vs. Complex

自然平衡与人工平衡

Natural vs. Artificial Balancing

优雅

Elegance

特点

Character

平衡类型#12:细节与想象力

Balance Type #12: Detail vs. Imagination

游戏平衡方法

Game Balancing Methodologies

平衡游戏经济

Balancing Game Economies

动态游戏平衡

Dynamic Game Balancing

总体情况

The Big Picture

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

14 个游戏机制支持谜题

14 Game Mechanics Support Puzzles

谜中之谜

The Puzzle of Puzzles

拼图不是已经消亡了吗?

Aren’t Puzzles Dead?

好谜题

Good Puzzles

拼图原则 1:让目标容易理解

Puzzle Principle #1: Make the Goal Easily Understood

拼图原则 #2:让入门变得简单

Puzzle Principle #2: Make It Easy to Get Started

拼图原则3:给人一种进步的感觉

Puzzle Principle #3: Give a Sense of Progress

拼图原则#4:给人一种可解性的感觉

Puzzle Principle #4: Give a Sense of Solvability

谜题原则#5:逐渐增加难度

Puzzle Principle #5: Increase Difficulty Gradually

谜题原则#6:平行设计让玩家休息

Puzzle Principle #6: Parallelism Lets the Player Rest

拼图原则7:金字塔结构扩展兴趣

Puzzle Principle #7: Pyramid Structure Extends Interest

谜题原则#8:提示可以增加兴趣

Puzzle Principle #8: Hints Extend Interest

谜题原则#9:给出答案!

Puzzle Principle #9: Give the Answer!

谜题原理#10:感知转变是一把双刃剑

Puzzle Principle #10: Perceptual Shifts Are a Double-Edged Sword

最后一部分

A Final Piece

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

15 名玩家通过界面玩游戏

15 Players Play Games through an Interface

阴阳之间

Between Yin and Yang

分解

Breaking It Down

互动循环

The Loop of Interaction

多汁

Juiciness

素数

Primality

信息渠道

Channels of Information

步骤 1:列出信息并确定其优先顺序

Step 1: List and Prioritize Information

第 2 步:列出频道

Step 2: List Channels

步骤 3:将信息映射到渠道

Step 3: Map Information to Channels

步骤 4:检查尺寸的使用情况

Step 4: Review Use of Dimensions

模式

Modes

模式提示 #1:尽可能少使用模式

Mode Tip #1: Use as Few Modes as Possible

模式提示 #2:避免模式重叠

Mode Tip #2: Avoid Overlapping Modes

模式提示 #3:让不同的模式看起来尽可能不同

Mode Tip #3: Make Different Modes Look as Different as Possible

其他界面提示

Other Interface Tips

界面提示#1:窃取

Interface Tip #1: Steal

界面提示#2:自定义

Interface Tip #2: Customize

界面提示#3:围绕物理界面进行设计

Interface Tip #3: Design around Your Physical Interface

界面提示#4:界面主题

Interface Tip #4: Theme Your Interface

界面提示#5:声音与触摸的映射

Interface Tip #5: Sound Maps to Touch

界面提示#6:通过层次平衡选项和简洁性

Interface Tip #6: Balance Options and Simplicity with Layers

界面提示#7:使用隐喻

Interface Tip #7: Use Metaphors

界面提示#8:如果看起来不同,那么它的行为也应该不同

Interface Tip #8: If It Looks Different, It Should Act Different

界面提示#9:测试,测试,测试!

Interface Tip #9: Test, Test, Test!

界面提示#10:打破规则来帮助你的玩家

Interface Tip #10: Break the Rules to Help Your Player

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

16 可以通过兴趣曲线来判断体验

16 Experiences Can Be Judged by Their Interest Curves

我的第一个镜头

My First Lens

利率曲线

Interest Curves

模式中的模式

Patterns inside Patterns

什么包含利息?

What Comprises Interest?

因素一:内在兴趣

Factor 1: Inherent Interest

因素二:表达的诗意

Factor 2: Poetry of Presentation

因素 3:投影

Factor 3: Projection

利息因素示例

Interest Factor Examples

综合起来

Putting It All Together

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

17 一种体验就是故事

17 One Kind of Experience Is the Story

故事/游戏二元性

Story/Game Duality

被动娱乐的神话

The Myth of Passive Entertainment

梦想

The Dream

现实

The Reality

现实世界方法 1:珍珠链

Real-World Method 1: The String of Pearls

现实世界方法 2:故事机器

Real-World Method 2: The Story Machine

问题

The Problems

问题1:好故事有统一性

Problem #1: Good Stories Have Unity

问题 2:组合爆炸

Problem #2: The Combinatorial Explosion

问题#4:动词不够

Problem #4: Not Enough Verbs

问题5:时间旅行让悲剧变得过时

Problem #5: Time Travel Makes Tragedy Obsolete

梦想重生

The Dream Reborn

游戏设计师的十个故事秘诀

Ten Story Tips for Game Designers

故事技巧1:尊重故事堆栈

Story Tip #1: Respect the Story Stack

故事提示#2:让你的故事发挥作用!

Story Tip #2: Put Your Story to Work!

故事提示3:目标、障碍和冲突

Story Tip #3: Goals, Obstacles, and Conflicts

故事提示#4:让故事变得真实

Story Tip #4: Make It Real

故事提示#5:提供简单性和超越性

Story Tip #5: Provide Simplicity and Transcendence

故事提示#6:思考英雄的旅程

Story Tip #6: Consider the Hero’s Journey

沃格勒的英雄之旅概要

Vogler’s Synopsis of the Hero’s Journey

故事技巧7:保持故事世界的一致性

Story Tip #7: Keep Your Story World Consistent

故事技巧#8:让你的故事世界更容易理解

Story Tip #8: Make Your Story World Accessible

故事提示#9:明智地使用陈词滥调

Story Tip #9: Use Clichés Judiciously

故事提示#10:有时地图可以让故事变得生动

Story Tip #10: Sometimes a Map Brings a Story to Life

故事提示#11:惊喜和情感

Story Tip #11: Surprise and Emotion

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

18. 故事和游戏结构可以与间接控制巧妙地融合

18 Story and Game Structures Can Be Artfully Merged with Indirect Control

自由的感觉

The Feeling of Freedom

间接控制方法1:约束

Indirect Control Method #1: Constraints

间接控制方法2:目标

Indirect Control Method #2: Goals

间接控制方法3:界面

Indirect Control Method #3: Interface

间接控制方法#4:视觉设计

Indirect Control Method #4: Visual Design

间接控制方法#5:角色

Indirect Control Method #5: Characters

间接控制方法6:音乐

Indirect Control Method #6: Music

共谋

Collusion

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

19 个故事和游戏发生在世界

19 Stories and Games Take Place in Worlds

跨媒体世界

Transmedia Worlds

宝可梦的力量

The Power of Pokémon

跨媒体世界的属性

Properties of Transmedia Worlds

跨媒体世界力量强大

Transmedia Worlds Are Powerful

跨媒体世界长久存在

Transmedia Worlds Are Long Lived

跨媒体世界随着时间的推移而发展

Transmedia Worlds Evolve over Time

成功的跨媒体世界有哪些共同点

What Successful Transmedia Worlds Have in Common

20 个世界包含角色

20 Worlds Contain Characters

游戏角色的本质

The Nature of Game Characters

小说人物

Novel Characters

电影角色

Movie Characters

游戏角色

Game Characters

头像

Avatars

理想形式

The Ideal Form

白板

The Blank Slate

创造引人注目的游戏角色

Creating Compelling Game Characters

角色提示 #1:列出角色功能

Character Tip #1: List Character Functions

角色提示#2:定义和使用角色特征

Character Tip #2: Define and Use Character Traits

角色提示#3:利用人际关系圈

Character Tip #3: Use the Interpersonal Circumplex

角色提示#4:制作角色网

Character Tip #4: Make a Character Web

阿奇

Archie

维罗妮卡

Veronica

贝蒂

Betty

雷吉

Reggie

Jughead

Jughead

角色提示#5:使用状态

Character Tip #5: Use Status

角色提示#6:利用声音的力量

Character Tip #6: Use the Power of the Voice

角色提示#7:利用面部的力量

Character Tip #7: Use the Power of the Face

角色提示#8:强有力的故事改变角色

Character Tip #8: Powerful Stories Transform Characters

角色提示#9:让你的角色给我们带来惊喜

Character Tip #9: Let Your Characters Surprise Us

角色提示#10:避免恐怖谷效应

Character Tip #10: Avoid the Uncanny Valley

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

21 个世界包含空间

21 Worlds Contain Spaces

建筑的目的

The Purpose of Architecture

组织你的游戏空间

Organizing Your Game Space

关于地标

A Word about Landmarks

克里斯托弗·亚历山大是个天才

Christopher Alexander Is a Genius

亚历山大生命结构的十五个特性

Alexander’s Fifteen Properties of Living Structures

真实与虚拟架构

Real vs. Virtual Architecture

知道有多大

Know How Big

第三人称扭曲

Third-Person Distortion

关卡设计

Level Design

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

22 一些界面创造了一种临场感

22 Some Interfaces Create a Feeling of Presence

存在的力量

The Power of Presence

六个破坏存在感的因素

Six Presence Breakers

破坏存在感的因素 #1:晕动症

Presence Breaker #1: Motion Sickness

破坏存在感的因素 #2:违反直觉的互动

Presence Breaker #2: Counter-Intuitive Interactions

破坏存在感的因素 #3:强度过大

Presence Breaker #3: Intensity Overload

破坏临场感的因素 #4:不真实的音频

Presence Breaker #4: Unrealistic Audio

存在感破坏者 #5:本体感受断开

Presence Breaker #5: Proprioceptive Disconnect

破坏存在感的因素#6:缺乏身份认同

Presence Breaker #6: Lack of Identity

六大存在构建者

Six Presence Builders

存在感构建器 #1:手部存在感

Presence Builder #1: Hand Presence

存在感构建器 #2:社交存在感

Presence Builder #2: Social Presence

存在感构建器 #3:熟悉感

Presence Builder #3: Familiarity

Presence Builder #4:逼真的音频

Presence Builder #4: Realistic Audio

存在感构建器 #5:本体感受校准

Presence Builder #5: Proprioceptive Alignment

风采构建者 #6:喜剧

Presence Builder #6: Comedy

鼓励环顾四周

Encourage Looking Around

考虑 Brownboxing

Consider Brownboxing

不同的硬件带来不同的体验

Different Hardware Enables Different Experiences

23 世界的观感由其美学决定

23 The Look and Feel of a World Is Defined by Its Aesthetics

莫奈拒绝手术

Monet Refuses the Operation

美学的价值

The Value of Aesthetics

学会观察

Learning to See

如何让美学指导你的设计

How to Let Aesthetics Guide Your Design

多少才够?

How Much Is Enough?

使用音频

Use Audio

平衡艺术与科技

Balancing Art and Technology

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

24 有些游戏是与其他玩家一起玩的

24 Some Games Are Played with Other Players

我们并不孤单

We Are Not Alone

为什么我们要和别人一起玩

Why We Play with Others

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

25 其他玩家有时会组建社区

25 Other Players Sometimes Form Communities

不仅仅是其他玩家

More than Just Other Players

打造强大社区的十个秘诀

Ten Tips for Strong Communities

社区建议 #1:培养友谊

Community Tip #1: Foster Friendships

社区建议 #2:将冲突置于核心位置

Community Tip #2: Put Conflict at the Heart

社区建议 #3:利用建筑塑造你的社区

Community Tip #3: Use Architecture to Shape Your Community

社区提示#4:创建社区财产

Community Tip #4: Create Community Property

社区建议 #5:让玩家表达自我

Community Tip #5: Let Players Express Themselves

社区建议 #6:支持三个层级

Community Tip #6: Support Three Levels

社区建议 #7:迫使玩家相互依赖

Community Tip #7: Force Players to Depend on Each Other

社区建议 #8:管理你的社区

Community Tip #8: Manage Your Community

社区建议 #9:对他人的义务是强大的

Community Tip #9: Obligation to Others Is Powerful

社区建议 #10:创建社区活动

Community Tip #10: Create Community Events

悲伤的挑战

The Challenge of Griefing

游戏社区的未来

The Future of Game Communities

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

26 设计师通常与团队合作

26 The Designer Usually Works with a Team

成功团队合作的秘诀

The Secret of Successful Teamwork

如果你不能热爱比赛,那就热爱观众

If You Can’t Love the Game, Love the Audience

共同设计

Designing Together

团队沟通

Team Communication

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

27 团队有时通过文档进行沟通

27 The Team Sometimes Communicates through Documents

游戏设计文档的神话

The Myth of the Game Design Document

文件的目的

The Purpose of Documents

记忆

Memory

沟通

Communication

游戏文件类型

Types of Game Documents

设计

Design

工程

Engineering

艺术

Art

生产

Production

写作

Writing

玩家

Players

那么,我从哪里开始呢?

So, Where Do I Start?

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

28 好游戏是通过游戏测试创造的

28 Good Games Are Created through Playtesting

游戏测试

Playtesting

我的可怕秘密

My Terrible Secret

游戏测试第一个问题:为什么?

Playtest Question the First: Why?

游戏测试第二个问题:谁?

Playtest Question the Second: Who?

游戏测试问题第三个:什么时候?

Playtest Question the Third: When?

游戏测试问题第四个:在哪里?

Playtest Question the Fourth: Where?

游戏测试问题第五个:什么?

Playtest Question the Fifth: What?

第一个是什么:你知道你正在寻找的东西

The First What: Things You Know You Are Looking For

第二个“什么”:你不知道自己在寻找的东西

The Second What: Things You Don’t Know You Are Looking For

游戏测试问题第六个:怎么样?

Playtest Question the Sixth: How?

你应该在那儿吗?

Should You Even Be There?

您首先要告诉他们什么?

What Do You Tell Them Up Front?

你看哪儿?

Where Do You Look?

游戏过程中您还应该收集哪些数据?

What Other Data Should You Collect During Play?

我会在游戏中期打扰玩家吗?

Will I Disturb the Players Midgame?

游戏结束后我将收集哪些数据?

What Data Will I Collect after the Play Session?

调查

Surveys

采访

Interviews

FFWWD

FFWWDD

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

29 团队利用科技打造游戏

29 The Team Builds a Game with Technology

科技,终于

Technology, At Last

基础性与装饰性

Foundational vs. Decorational

米奇的第一部动画片

Mickey’s First Cartoon

鲍鱼

Abalone

刺猬索尼克

Sonic the Hedgehog

神秘岛

Myst

旅行

Journey

布娃娃物理

Ragdoll Physics

触摸革命

The Touch Revolution

炒作周期

The Hype Cycle

创新者的窘境

The Innovator’s Dilemma

发散定律

The Law of Divergence

奇点

The Singularity

看看你的水晶球

Look into Your Crystal Ball

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

30.你的游戏可能会有一个客户端

30 Your Game Will Probably Have a Client

谁在乎客户的想法?

Who Cares What the Client Thinks?

应对不良建议

Coping with Bad Suggestions

不是那块石头

Not That Rock

欲望的三个层次

The Three Layers of Desire

佛罗伦萨,1498 年

Firenze, 1498

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

31 设计师向客户进行推介

31 The Designer Gives the Client a Pitch

为什么是我?

Why Me?

权力的谈判

A Negotiation of Power

思想的层次

The Hierarchy of Ideas

成功推销的十二个秘诀

Twelve Tips for a Successful Pitch

推销技巧 #1:走进门

Pitch Tip #1: Get in the Door

推销技巧 #2:表现出你的认真态度

Pitch Tip #2: Show You Are Serious

推销技巧 #3:要有条理

Pitch Tip #3: Be Organized

推销秘诀#4:要充满激情!!!!!

Pitch Tip #4: Be Passionate!!!!!

推销技巧#5:假设他们的观点

Pitch Tip #5: Assume Their Point of View

推介技巧 #6:设计推介

Pitch Tip #6: Design the Pitch

推销技巧#7:了解所有细节

Pitch Tip #7: Know All the Details

推销技巧#8:展现自信

Pitch Tip #8: Exude Confidence

推销技巧#9:保持灵活性

Pitch Tip #9: Be Flexible

演讲技巧#10:排练

Pitch Tip #10: Rehearse

推销技巧#11:让他们拥有它

Pitch Tip #11: Get Them to Own It

推销技巧#12:跟进

Pitch Tip #12: Follow Up

嘿,Kickstarter 怎么样?

Hey, What about Kickstarter?

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

32 设计师和客户希望游戏盈利

32 The Designer and Client Want the Game to Make a Profit

爱情与金钱

Love and Money

了解你的商业模式

Know Your Business Model

零售

Retail

直接下载

Direct Download

免费玩

Free-to-Play

了解你的竞争对手

Know Your Competition

了解你的受众

Know Your Audience

学习语言

Learn the Language

一般游戏业务条款

General Game Business Terms

免费游戏业务条款

Free-to-Play Business Terms

了解畅销商品

Know the Top Sellers

屏障的重要性

The Importance of Barriers

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

33 款游戏改变了玩家

33 Games Transform Their Players

游戏如何改变我们?

How Do Games Change Us?

游戏对你有好处吗?

Can Games Be Good for You?

情感维护

Emotional Maintenance

正在连接

Connecting

锻炼

Exercise

教育

Education

满足大脑需求

Giving the Brain What It Wants

事实

Facts

解决问题

Problem Solving

关系系统

Systems of Relationships

新见解

New Insights

好奇心

Curiosity

创造可教时刻

Creating Teachable Moments

转型游戏

Transformational Games

转型秘诀 1:明确转型目标

Transformational Tip #1: Define Your Transformation

转型秘诀 2:找到优秀的主题专家

Transformational Tip #2: Find Great Subject Matter Experts

转型提示#3:教练需要什么?

Transformational Tip #3: What Does the Instructor Need?

转型秘诀#4:不要做得太多

Transformational Tip #4: Don’t Do Too Much

转型秘诀 5:适当评估转型

Transformational Tip #5: Assess Transformation Appropriately

转型秘诀#6:选择合适的场地

Transformational Tip #6: Choose the Right Venue

转型秘诀7:接受市场的现实

Transformational Tip #7: Accept the Realities of the Market

游戏会对你有害吗?

Can Games Be Bad for You?

暴力

Violence

Addiction

体验

Experiences

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

34 设计师有一定的责任

34 Designers Have Certain Responsibilities

默默无闻的危险

The Danger of Obscurity

负责任

Being Accountable

你的隐藏议程

Your Hidden Agenda

显而易见的秘密

The Secret Hidden in Plain Sight

戒指

The Ring

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

35 每个设计师都有自己的目的

35 Each Designer Has a Purpose

最深层的主题

The Deepest Theming

再见

Goodbye

致谢

Acknowledgments

尾注

Endnotes

参考书目

Bibliography

指数

Index

镜头表

TABLE OF LENSES

#1 情感的视角

#1 The Lens of Emotion

#2 基本经验的视角

#2 The Lens of Essential Experience

#3 场地的视角

#3 The Lens of the Venue

#4 惊喜的镜头

#4 The Lens of Surprise

#5 趣味镜头

#5 The Lens of Fun

#6 好奇心的镜头

#6 The Lens of Curiosity

7. 内生价值的视角

#7 The Lens of Endogenous Value

8. 解决问题的视角

#8 The Lens of Problem Solving

#9 四元素透镜

#9 The Lens of the Elemental Tetrad

10. 全息设计镜头

#10 The Lens of Holographic Design

#11 统一的视角

#11 The Lens of Unification

#12 共振透镜

#12 The Lens of Resonance

#13 无限灵感的镜头

#13 The Lens of Infinite Inspiration

14. 问题陈述的视角

#14 The Lens of the Problem Statement

#15 八种滤镜的镜头

#15 The Lens of the Eight Filters

#16 风险缓解的视角

#16 The Lens of Risk Mitigation

#17 玩具的镜头

#17 The Lens of the Toy

#18 激情的镜头

#18 The Lens of Passion

#19 玩家的视角

#19 The Lens of the Player

#20 愉悦的镜头

#20 The Lens of Pleasure

#21 流动的镜头

#21 The Lens of Flow

#22 需求视角

#22 The Lens of Needs

#23 动机的视角

#23 The Lens of Motivation

#24 新奇的视角

#24 The Lens of Novelty

#25 判断的视角

#25 The Lens of Judgment

#26 功能空间的视角

#26 The Lens of Functional Space

#27 时间的镜头

#27 The Lens of Time

#28 国家机器的视角

#28 The Lens of the State Machine

#29 秘密的镜头

#29 The Lens of Secrets

#30 涌现的镜头

#30 The Lens of Emergence

#31 行动的镜头

#31 The Lens of Action

#32 目标的视角

#32 The Lens of Goals

#33 规则的视角

#33 The Lens of Rules

#34 技能的视角

#34 The Lens of Skill

#35 期望值的视角

#35 The Lens of Expected Value

#36 机遇的镜头

#36 The Lens of Chance

#37 公平的视角

#37 The Lens of Fairness

#38 挑战的镜头

#38 The Lens of Challenge

#39 有意义的选择的视角

#39 The Lens of Meaningful Choices

#40 三角镜头

#40 The Lens of Triangularity

#41 技能与机遇的对比

#41 The Lens of Skill vs. Chance

#42 头部和手部的镜头

#42 The Lens of Head and Hands

#43 竞争的视角

#43 The Lens of Competition

#44 合作的视角

#44 The Lens of Cooperation

#45 竞争与合作的视角

#45 The Lens of Competition vs. Cooperation

#46 奖励的视角

#46 The Lens of Reward

#47 惩罚的镜头

#47 The Lens of Punishment

#48 简单/复杂的视角

#48 The Lens of Simplicity/Complexity

#49 优雅的镜头

#49 The Lens of Elegance

#50 角色镜头

#50 The Lens of Character

#51 想象的镜头

#51 The Lens of Imagination

#52 经济视角

#52 The Lens of Economy

#53 平衡的镜头

#53 The Lens of Balance

#54 无障碍视角

#54 The Lens of Accessibility

#55 可见进步的镜头

#55 The Lens of Visible Progress

#56 平行的视角

#56 The Lens of Parallelism

#57 金字塔的镜头

#57 The Lens of the Pyramid

#58 谜题的镜头

#58 The Lens of the Puzzle

#59 控制的视角

#59 The Lens of Control

#60 物理界面的视角

#60 The Lens of Physical Interface

#61 虚拟界面的镜头

#61 The Lens of Virtual Interface

#62 透明的镜头

#62 The Lens of Transparency

#63 反馈的视角

#63 The Lens of Feedback

#64 多汁镜头

#64 The Lens of Juiciness

#65 原始镜头

#65 The Lens of Primality

#66 渠道和维度的视角

#66 The Lens of Channels and Dimensions

#67 模式的镜头

#67 The Lens of Modes

#67½ 隐喻的视角

#67½ The Lens of Metaphor

#68 镜头下的瞬间

#68 The Lens of Moments

#69 利率曲线的视角

#69 The Lens of the Interest Curve

#70 内在兴趣的视角

#70 The Lens of Inherent Interest

#71 美的镜头

#71 The Lens of Beauty

#72 投影镜头

#72 The Lens of Projection

#73 故事机器的镜头

#73 The Lens of the Story Machine

#74 障碍的镜头

#74 The Lens of the Obstacle

#75 简单与超越的镜头

#75 The Lens of Simplicity and Transcendence

#76 英雄之旅的镜头

#76 The Lens of the Hero’s Journey

#77 最奇怪事物的镜头

#77 The Lens of the Weirdest Thing

#78 故事的镜头

#78 The Lens of Story

#79 自由的镜头

#79 The Lens of Freedom

#80 帮助的视角

#80 The Lens of Help

#81 间接控制的视角

#81 The Lens of Indirect Control

#82 勾结的镜头

#82 The Lens of Collusion

#83 奇幻镜头

#83 The Lens of Fantasy

#84 镜头下的世界

#84 The Lens of the World

#85 阿凡达的镜头

#85 The Lens of the Avatar

#86 角色功能的视角

#86 The Lens of Character Function

#87 性格特征的视角

#87 The Lens of Character Traits

#88 人际交往的视角

#88 The Lens of the Interpersonal Circumplex

#89 角色网络的镜头

#89 The Lens of the Character Web

#90 地位的视角

#90 The Lens of Status

#91 角色转变的镜头

#91 The Lens of Character Transformation

#92 内心矛盾的镜头

#92 The Lens of Inner Contradiction

#93 无名品质的镜头

#93 The Lens of The Nameless Quality

#93½ 存在感的镜头

#93½ The Lens of Presence

#94 氛围镜头

#94 The Lens of Atmosphere

#95 观看的镜头

#95 The Lens of Spectation

#95½ 欺骗的视角

#95½ The Lens of Cheatability

#96 友谊的镜头

#96 The Lens of Friendship

#97 表达的镜头

#97 The Lens of Expression

#98 社区视角

#98 The Lens of Community

#99 悲伤的镜头

#99 The Lens of Griefing

#100 爱的镜头

#100 The Lens of Love

#101 团队的视角

#101 The Lens of the Team

#102 文献视角

#102 The Lens of Documentation

#103 游戏测试的视角

#103 The Lens of Playtesting

#104 科技的视角

#104 The Lens of Technology

#105 水晶球的镜头

#105 The Lens of the Crystal Ball

#106 乌托邦的镜头

#106 The Lens of Utopia

#107 客户的视角

#107 The Lens of the Client

#108 球场上的镜头

#108 The Lens of the Pitch

#109 利润的视角

#109 The Lens of Profit

#110 转型的镜头

#110 The Lens of Transformation

#111 责任的视角

#111 The Lens of Responsibility

#112 乌鸦的镜头

#112 The Lens of the Raven

#∞ 你的秘密目的的镜头

#∞ The Lens of Your Secret Purpose

我会和你谈论艺术,

因为没有别的事可谈,

因为没有别的东西了。

I will talk to you of art,

For there is nothing else to talk about,

For there is nothing else.

生命是一个默默无闻的流浪汉,

搭乘艺术巴士。

— 马克斯韦尔·H·布罗克           

Life is an obscure hobo,

Bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.

—Maxwell H. Brock           

你好

HELLO

你好!进来吧,进来吧!真是个惊喜——我没想到你今天会来。抱歉这里有点乱,我一直在写东西。请——让自己舒服点。很好,很好。现在让我们看看……我们应该从哪里开始?哦——我应该自我介绍一下!

Hello there! Come in, come in! What a nice surprise—I had no idea you would be visiting today. I’m sorry if it is a little messy in here, I’ve been writing. Please—make yourself comfortable. Good, good. Now let’s see… where should we begin? Oh—I should introduce myself!

我叫 Jesse Schell,我一直热爱设计游戏。这是我的照片:

My name is Jesse Schell, and I have always loved designing games. Here’s picture of me:

那时我个子比较矮。自那张照片拍摄以来,我做过很多不同的事情。我曾在马戏团当过专业杂耍演员。我当过作家、喜剧演员和魔术师学徒。我曾在 IBM 和贝尔通信研究公司担任软件工程师。我为华特迪士尼公司设计和开发过互动主题公园游乐设施和大型多人游戏。我创办了自己的游戏工作室,并成为卡内基梅隆大学的教授。但当人们问我做什么时,我会告诉他们我是一名游戏设计师。

I was shorter then. Since that picture was taken, I’ve done a lot of different things. I’ve worked in circuses as a professional juggler. I’ve been a writer, comedian, and magician’s apprentice. I’ve worked at IBM and Bell Communications Research as a software engineer. I’ve designed and developed interactive theme park rides and massively multiplayer games for the Walt Disney Company. I’ve started my own game studio, and become a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. But when people ask me what I do, I tell them that I am a game designer.

我之所以提到这些,是因为在本书的不同时间,我将从这些经历中举例,因为每一个经历都教会了我关于游戏设计艺术的宝贵经验。现在听起来可能令人惊讶,但希望当你阅读本书时,它能帮助你看到游戏设计如何与你自己生活中的许多经历有意义地联系在一起。

I mention all this only because at various times in this book, I will be drawing examples from these experiences, since every single one of them has taught me valuable lessons about the art of game design. That might sound surprising now, but hopefully, as you read this book, it will help you see the ways that game design meaningfully connects to the many experiences in your own life.

有一件事我应该澄清:虽然这本书的目的主要是教你如何成为一名更好的电子游戏设计师,但我们探索的许多原则与电子游戏并没有太大关系——你会发现它们更广泛地适用于电子游戏。比这更适用。好消息是,无论您设计哪种游戏(数字、模拟或其他),您在这里阅读的大部分内容都同样适用。

One thing I should clarify: While the goal of this book is primarily to teach you how to be a better videogame designer, many of the principles we explore will have little to do with videogames specifically—you will find they are more broadly applicable than that. The good news is that much of what you read here will work equally well no matter what kind of game you are designing—digital, analog, or otherwise.

什么是游戏设计?

What Is Game Design?

在我们开始之前,我们必须绝对清楚“游戏设计”的含义。毕竟,这是本书其余部分的主题,而有些人似乎对此有点困惑。

As we begin, it is important for us to be absolutely clear about what is meant by “game design.” After all, it is what the rest of the book is about, and some people seem a bit confused about it.

  • 游戏设计是决定游戏应该是什么的行为。

  • Game design is the act of deciding what a game should be.

就是这样。表面上看,这听起来太简单了。

That’s it. On the surface, it sounds too simple.

  • “你的意思是,你只通过一个决定来设计游戏吗?”

  • “You mean you design a game by just making one decision?”

不。要决定什么是游戏,你必须做出数百个、通常数千个决定。

No. To decide what a game is, you must make hundreds, usually thousands of decisions.

  • “设计游戏不需要特殊设备吗?”

  • “Don’t I need special equipment to design a game?”

不。由于游戏设计只是简单的决策,因此您实际上可以在脑海中设计游戏。不过,通常情况下,您会希望写下这些决定,因为我们的记忆力很差,如果不写下来,很容易错过一些重要的事情。此外,如果您希望其他人帮助您做出决定或帮助构建游戏,您需要以某种方式将这些决定传达给他们,而写下来是一种很好的方法。

No. Since game design is simply decision making, you can actually design a game in your head. Usually, though, you will want to write down these decisions, because our memories are weak, and it is easy to miss something important if you don’t write things down. Further, if you want other people to help you make decisions, or to help build the game, you need to communicate these decisions to them somehow, and writing them down is a good way to do that.

  • “那编程呢?游戏设计师不是必须得是计算机程序员吗?”

  • “What about programming? Don’t game designers have to be computer programmers?”

不,它们不需要。首先,许多游戏无需使用计算机或技术即可玩;例如棋盘游戏、纸牌游戏和运动游戏。其次,即使是电脑游戏或视频游戏,也可以在不了解这些决策如何执行的所有技术细节的情况下决定这些游戏应该是什么。当然,如果你知道这些细节,那将有很大帮助,就像成为一名熟练的作家或艺术家会有所帮助一样。这可以让你更快地做出更好的决定,但这并不是绝对必要的。这就像建筑师和木匠之间的关系:建筑师不需要知道木匠所知道的一切,但建筑师必须知道木匠能做的一切。

No, they don’t. First of all, many games can be played without the use of computers or technology; board games, card games, and athletic games, for example. Secondly, even for computer games or videogames, it is possible to make the decisions about what those games should be without knowing all the technical details of how those decisions are carried out. Of course, it can be a tremendous help if you do know these details, just as being a skilled writer or artist can help. This allows you to make better decisions more quickly, but it is not strictly necessary. It is like the relationship between architects and carpenters: an architect does not need to know everything the carpenter knows, but an architect must know everything the carpenter is capable of.

  • “所以,你的意思是游戏设计师只是想出了游戏的故事情节?”

  • “So, you mean that the game designer just comes up with the story for the game?”

不是。故事决策是游戏设计的一个方面,但还有许多其他方面。关于规则、外观和感觉、时间、节奏、冒险、奖励、惩罚以及玩家体验的其他一切的决策都是游戏设计师的责任。

No. Story decisions are one aspect of a game design, but there are many, many others. Decisions about rules, look and feel, timing, pacing, risk-taking, rewards, punishments, and everything else the player experiences is the responsibility of the game designer.

  • “所以游戏设计师会决定游戏应该是什么样子,然后把它们写下来,然后继续做下去?”

  • “So the game designer makes decisions about what the game should be, writes them down, and moves on?”

几乎从不。我们当中没有人拥有完美的想象力,我们在头脑中和纸上设计的游戏几乎从来都不是我们所期望的那样。设计师在看到游戏实际运行之前,许多决定都是不可能做出的。因此,设计师通常从游戏开发一开始到最后都参与其中,在整个过程中决定游戏应该如何发展。

Almost never. None of us has a perfect imagination, and the games we design in our heads and on paper almost never come out quite the way we expected. Many decisions are impossible to make until the designer has seen the game in action. For this reason, the designer is usually involved in the development of a game from the very beginning to the very end, making decisions about how the game should be all along the way.

区分“游戏开发者”和“游戏设计师”非常重要。游戏开发者是指参与游戏创作的任何人。从事游戏开发的工程师、动画师、建模师、音乐家、作家、制作人和设计师都是游戏开发者。游戏设计师只是游戏开发者的一种。

It is important to make the distinction between “game developer” and “game designer.” A game developer is anyone who has any involvement with the creation of the game at all. Engineers, animators, modelers, musicians, writers, producers, and designers who work on games are all game developers. Game designers are just one species of game developer.

  • “所以,只有游戏设计师才有权对游戏做出决定吗?”

  • “So, the game designer is the only one allowed to make decisions about the game?”

让我们反过来想:任何决定游戏应该如何设计的人都是游戏设计师。设计师是一个角色,而不是一个人。几乎团队中的每个开发人员都会通过为游戏创建内容的行为来决定游戏应该如何设计。这些决定是游戏设计决定,当你做出这些决定时,你就是一名游戏设计师。因此,无论你在游戏开发团队中扮演什么角色,了解游戏设计的原则都会让你做得更好。

Let’s turn that around: Anyone who makes decisions about how the game should be is a game designer. Designer is a role, not a person. Almost every developer on a team makes some decisions about how the game will be, just through the act of creating content for the game. These decisions are game design decisions, and when you make them, you are a game designer. For this reason, no matter what your role on a game development team, an understanding of the principles of game design will make you better at what you do.

等待门捷列夫

Waiting for Mendeleev

探索之旅不在于寻找新的风景,而在于拥有新的视角。

—马塞尔·普鲁斯特

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

—Marcel Proust

本书的目标是让你成为最好的游戏设计师。

The goal of this book is to make you the best game designer you can be.

不幸的是,目前还没有“游戏设计的统一理论”,也没有简单的公式告诉我们如何制作优秀的游戏。那么我们能做什么呢?

Unfortunately, at present, there is no “unified theory of game design,” no simple formula that shows us how to make good games. So what can we do?

我们处在与古代炼金术士类似的境地。在门捷列夫(men-duh-lay-uv)发现元素周期表(显示所有基本元素如何相互关联)之前,炼金术士依靠一套拼凑起来的经验法则来判断不同化学物质如何结合。这些法则必然是不完整的,有时是错误的,而且往往是半神秘的,但通过运用这些法则,炼金术士能够完成令人惊讶的事情,他们对真理的追求最终导致了现代化学的出现。

We are in a position something like the ancient alchemists. In the time before Mendeleev (men-duh-lay-uv) discovered the periodic table, showing how all the fundamental elements were interrelated, alchemists relied on a patchwork quilt of rules of thumb about how different chemicals could combine. These were necessarily incomplete, sometimes incorrect, and often semimystical, but by using these rules, the alchemists were able to accomplish surprising things, and their pursuit of the truth eventually led to modern chemistry.

游戏设计师们正在等待他们的门捷列夫。目前我们还没有元素周期表。我们有自己的一套原则和规则,虽然不够完美,但可以让我们完成工作。我试图把其中最好的原则和规则集中到一个地方,这样你就可以研究它们、考虑它们、利用它们,并看看别人是如何利用它们的。

Game designers await their Mendeleev. At this point we have no periodic table. We have our own patchwork of principles and rules, which, less than perfect, allows us to get the job done. I have tried to gather together the best of these into one place, so that you can study them, consider them, make use of them, and see how others have used them.

当你从尽可能多的角度看待游戏时,就会产生优秀的游戏设计。我将这些角度称为镜头,因为每个角度都是观察设计的一种方式。镜头是您应该就设计向自己提出的一小组问题。它们不是蓝图或配方,而是检查设计的工具。本书将逐一介绍它们。为配合本书,我们制作了一副纸牌,每张纸牌总结一个镜头。它可以作为免费的智能手机应用程序使用(在 iOS 或 Android 上搜索“deck of lens”),也可以购买实体纸牌(在亚马逊上搜索“deck of lens”),以便在设计时轻松使用镜头。请访问artofgamedesign.com了解更多信息,并获得免费的第三版增强包。

Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible. I refer to these perspectives as lenses, because each one is a way of viewing your design. The lenses are small sets of questions you should ask yourself about your design. They are not blueprints or recipes, but tools for examining your design. They will be introduced, one at a time, throughout the book. A deck of cards, with one card summarizing each lens, has been created to accompany this book. It is available as a free smartphone app (search for “deck of lenses” on iOS or Android), and can also be purchased as a physical deck of cards (search for “deck of lenses” on Amazon), to make it easy to use the lenses while you are designing. Visit artofgamedesign.com for more information, and a free third edition booster pack.

没有哪种透镜是完美的,也没有哪种透镜是完整的,但每种透镜在某种情况下都有用,因为每种透镜都能为您的设计提供独特的视角。这个想法是,即使我们无法拥有一幅完整的画面,通过采用所有这些不完美的小透镜,并使用它们从许多不同的角度来查看您的问题,您将能够使用您的判断力来找出最佳设计。我希望我们有一个全视透镜。我们没有。因此,与其丢弃我们拥有的许多不完美的透镜,不如收集和使用尽可能多的透镜,这是最明智的做法,因为我们将会看到,游戏设计更像是艺术而不是科学,更像是烹饪而不是化学,我们必须承认我们的门捷列夫可能永远不会出现。

None of the lenses are perfect, and none are complete, but each is useful in one context or another, for each gives a unique perspective on your design. The idea is that even though we can’t have one complete picture, by taking all of these small imperfect lenses and using them to view your problem from many different perspectives, you will be able to use your discretion to figure out the best design. I wish we had one all-seeing lens. We don’t. So, instead of discarding the many imperfect ones we do have, it is wisest to collect and use as wide a variety of them as possible, for as we will see, game design is more art than science, more like cooking than chemistry, and we must admit the possibility that our Mendeleev will never come.

关注基本面

Focus on Fundamentals

许多人认为,要想最好地研究游戏设计的原理,人们自然会研究最现代、最复杂、最高科技的游戏。这种方法完全错误。电子游戏只是传统游戏自然发展成为一种新媒介。支配它们的规则仍然是一样的。建筑师必须先了解如何设计棚屋,然后才能设计摩天大楼,所以我们经常会研究一些非常简单的游戏。其中一些是电子游戏,但也有一些简单得多:骰子游戏。纸牌游戏。棋盘游戏。操场游戏。如果我们无法理解这些游戏的原理,又怎么能希望理解更复杂的游戏呢?有些人会认为这些游戏很古老,因此不值得研究,但正如梭罗所说,“我们不妨忽略对大自然的研究,因为她很古老。”游戏就是游戏。使经典游戏有趣的原理与使大多数现代游戏有趣的原理相同。经典游戏还有一个额外的优势,那就是它们经受住了时间的考验。它们的成功并非归功于其技术的新颖性,而许多现代游戏都是如此。这些经典游戏具有更深层次的品质,作为游戏设计师,我们必须学会理解这些品质。

Many people assume that to best study the principles of game design, one would naturally study the most modern, complex, high-tech games that are available. This approach is completely wrong. Videogames are just a natural growth of traditional games into a new medium. The rules that govern them are still the same. An architect must understand how to design a shed before she can design a skyscraper, and so we will often be studying some of the very simplest games. Some of these will be videogames, but some will be far simpler: Dice games. Card games. Board games. Playground games. If we cannot understand the principles of these games, how can we have a hope of understanding more complex games? Some will argue that these games are old, and therefore not worth studying, but as Thoreau said, “We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.” A game is a game is a game. The principles that make the classic games fun are the same principles that make the most modern games fun. The classic games have the added advantage that they have withstood the tests of time. Their success is not due to the novelty of their technology, which is the case with many modern games. These classic games have deeper qualities that, as game designers, we must learn to understand.

本书除了重点介绍经典游戏外,还将努力传授游戏设计最深刻、最基本的原则,而不是特定类型的原则(“制作更好的基于故事的第一人称射击游戏的 15 个技巧!”),因为游戏类型来来去去,但游戏设计的基本原则是人类心理学的原则,这些原则已经伴随我们多年,并将伴随我们多年。精通这些基础知识,你将能够掌握任何出现的游戏类型,甚至发明自己的新游戏类型。与其他关于游戏设计的书籍不同,这些书籍的目标往往是尽可能多地涵盖内容,而本书不会努力涵盖内容,而是教你挖掘最肥沃的地方。

As well as a focus on classic games, this book will strive to deliver the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design, as opposed to genre-specific principles (“Fifteen tips for a better story-based first-person shooter!”), because genres come and go, but the basic principles of game design are principles of human psychology that have been with us for ages, and will be with us for ages to come. Well-versed in these fundamentals, you will be able to master any genre that appears, and even invent new genres of your own. As opposed to other books on game design, whose goal often seems to be to cover as much ground as possible, this book will not strive to cover ground, but to teach you to dig in the most fertile places.

尽管本书将教给您创作传统棋盘和纸牌游戏的原理,但它却偏向于电子游戏行业。为什么?因为游戏设计师的工作就是创作新游戏。计算机技术的爆炸式发展使游戏设计领域出现了前所未有的创新。当今的游戏设计师数量比人类历史上任何时候都多。如果您想创作游戏,那么您很有可能会用这种新技术的前沿技术来创作游戏,本书就是为您准备的,尽管本书中的大多数原理也同样适用于更传统的游戏类型。

And though this book will teach you principles you will be able to use to create traditional board and card games, it is very much slanted toward the videogame industry. Why? Because a game designer’s job is to create new games. The explosion of computer technology has allowed for innovation in the field of game design such as the world has never seen. There are more game designers alive today than have ever been alive in all of human history. Chances are, if you want to create games, you will be creating them somewhere on the cutting edge of this new technology, and this book is prepared to show you how to do just that, although most of the principles here will work just as well with more traditional game genres.

和陌生人说话

Talk to Strangers

不要忘记招待陌生人,因为这样做,有些人就会不知不觉地招待天使。

—希伯来书 13:2

Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels.

—Hebrews 13:2

游戏开发者以仇外心理而闻名,即害怕陌生人。我指的不是陌生的人,而是陌生的技术、做法和原则。他们似乎认为,如果这种恐惧不是源自游戏行业,这不值得考虑。事实是,游戏开发者通常太忙了,无法放眼周围环境之外。制作好游戏很难,所以开发者们埋头苦干,保持专注,完成工作。他们通常没有时间寻找新技术,弄清楚如何将它们融入到他们的游戏中,并承担新技术可能失败的风险。所以,他们谨慎行事,坚持他们所知道的东西,不幸的是,这导致你在市场上看到的许多“千篇一律”的游戏。

Game developers have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, fear of strangers. By this I mean not unfamiliar individuals, but rather unfamiliar techniques, practices, and principles. It almost seems like they believe that if it didn’t originate in the game industry, it isn’t worth considering. The truth is really that game developers are usually just too busy to look outside their immediate surroundings. Making good games is hard, so developers keep their heads down, stay focused, and get the job done. They usually don’t have the time to seek out new techniques, figure out how to integrate them into their games, and take the risk that a new technique might fail. So, they play it safe, and stick with what they know, which unfortunately leads to a lot of the “cookie-cutter” game titles that you see on the market.

但是要想成功,要想创造出伟大而创新的东西,你必须做些与众不同的事情。这不是一本关于如何制作千篇一律的游戏的书。这是一本关于如何创造伟大的新设计的书。如果你对这本书对非数字游戏的关注感到惊讶,你会更惊讶地看到它是如何运用甚至不是游戏的事物中的原则、方法和例子的。音乐、建筑、电影、科学、绘画、文学和世间一切事物中的例子都将被引入。为什么不呢?为什么我们必须从头开始开发所有的原则,而我们可以利用的艰苦工作在其他领域已经进行了数百年或数千年?设计原则将来自四面八方,因为设计无处不在,而设计在任何地方都是一样的。这本书不仅会从各个地方汲取设计灵感,还会说服你也这样做。你所知道的一切和你所经历的一切在游戏设计桌上都是公平的。

But to succeed, to create something great and innovative, you have to do something different. This is not a book about how to make cookie-cutter games. It is a book about how to create great new designs. If you were surprised by the focus this book places on non-digital games, you will be even more surprised to see how it uses principles, methods, and examples from things that aren’t even games. Examples from music, architecture, film, science, painting, literature, and everything else under the sun will be pulled in. And why not? Why should we have to develop all our principles from scratch, when hard work we can use has been going on in other fields, sometimes for hundreds or thousands of years? Design principles will come from everywhere because design is everywhere, and design is the same everywhere. Not only will this book draw design inspiration from everywhere, it will persuade you to do the same. Everything you know and everything you have experienced is fair game at the game design table.

地图

The Map

一个人学什么并不重要。所有的知识都是相关的,只要坚持学习,任何知识都会变得博学。

—希帕蒂娅

It does not make much difference what a person studies. All knowledge is related, and the man who studies anything, if he keeps at it, will become learned.

—Hypatia

游戏设计不是一个容易写的话题。视角和基本原理是有用的工具,但要真正理解游戏设计,就必须理解一个由创造力、心理学、艺术、技术和商业组成的极其复杂的网络。这个网络中的一切都与其他所有元素相连。改变一个元素会影响所有其他元素,对一个元素的理解会影响对所有其他元素的理解。大多数经验丰富的设计师都在自己的脑海中慢慢地、经过多年的反复试验,建立了这个网络,学习了元素和关系。这就是游戏设计很难写的原因。书籍必然是线性的。每次只能提出一个想法。因此,许多游戏设计书籍给人一种不完整的感觉——就像带着手电筒的夜间导游,读者看到了很多有趣的东西,但无法真正理解它们是如何组合在一起的。

Game design is not an easy subject to write about. Lenses and fundamentals are useful tools, but to truly understand game design is to understand an incredibly complex web of creativity, psychology, art, technology, and business. Everything in this web is connected to everything else. Changing one element affects all the others, and the understanding of one element influences the understanding of all of the others. Most experienced designers have built up this web in their minds, slowly, over many years, learning the elements and relationships by trial and error. And this is what makes game design so hard to write about. Books are necessarily linear. One idea must be presented at a time. For this reason, many game design books have an incomplete feeling to them—like a guided nighttime tour with a flashlight, the reader sees a lot of interesting things, but can’t really comprehend how they all fit together.

游戏设计是一场冒险,而冒险需要一张地图。在这本书中,我创建了一张地图,展示了游戏设计关系网。你可以在书的末尾可以看到完整的地图,但一次看到整个地图会让人感到困惑和不知所措。毕加索曾经说过,“要创造,必须先毁灭。”我们也会这么做。我们将一切都放在一边,从一张白纸开始绘制我们的地图。在我们这样做的同时,我也鼓励你抛开你对游戏设计的先入之见,这样你就可以以开放的心态来对待这个困难但迷人的主题。

Game design is an adventure, and adventure needs a map. For this book, I have created a map that shows the web of game design relationships. You can see the complete map near the end of the book, but to see the entire map at once is confusing and overwhelming. Picasso once said, “To create, one must first destroy.” And so we will. We set everything aside, and begin our map as a blank slate. As we do this, I encourage you, too, to set aside your preconceptions about game design, so that you can approach this difficult but fascinating subject with an open mind.

第 1 章将首先添加一个元素,即设计师。后续章节将逐一添加其他元素,逐渐建立设计师、玩家、游戏、团队和客户之间复杂的关系系统,以便您了解它们如何组合在一起,以及它们为什么如此组合在一起。在本书的结尾,您将在纸上和脑海中拥有这些关系的地图。当然,纸上的地图并不重要——重要的是您脑海中的地图。地图不是领土。它必然是不完美的。但希望在本书帮助您在脑海中创建关系地图之后,您将根据现实测试您的思维地图,修改和增强它,因为您发现其中可以改进的部分。每个设计师都会经历构建自己个人关系地图的过程。如果您是游戏设计新手,这本书应该能够为您提供地图的开端。如果您已经是一位经验丰富的游戏设计师,我希望这本书可以为您提供一些关于如何改进现有地图的想法。

Chapter 1 will begin by adding a single element, the designer. Successive chapters will add other elements, one at a time, gradually building up the complex system of relationships between designer, player, game, team, and client, so you can see how they fit together, and why they fit together the way they do. By the end of the book, you will have, both on paper and in your mind, a map of these relationships. Of course, the map on paper is not the important one—the important one is the one in your mind. And the map is not the territory. It will necessarily be imperfect. But hopefully, after this book helps to create a map of relationships in your mind, you will test your mental map against reality, altering it and augmenting it, as you find parts of it that can be improved. Every designer goes through the journey of building their own personal map of these relationships. If you are new to game design, this book should be able to give you the beginnings of your map. If you are already a seasoned game designer, I hope that this book can give you some ideas about how to improve the map you have.

学会思考

Learning to Think

每个真理都有四个角:作为老师,我给你一个角,让你去寻找另外三个角。

-孔子

Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.

—Confucius

孔子在说什么?一个好老师难道不应该把所有事情都清楚地展示给你吗?不。要真正学习、记忆和理解,你的头脑必须处于探索、寻求知识的状态。如果你的头脑没有处于这种状态,没有真正想要深入理解的状态,那么最明智的原则就会像水从鸭子身上流过一样对你不屑一顾。这本书中有时会不把事情清楚地展示出来——有时事情故意不那么清晰,这样当你发现真相时,它对你来说就有意义了。

What is Confucius talking about? Shouldn’t a good teacher show you all four corners, laying everything out plainly? No. To truly learn, remember, and understand, your mind must be in a state of questing, of seeking to find knowledge. If it is not in this state, a state of really wanting to deeply understand, the wisest principles will roll off you like water off a duck. There will be times in this book where things will not be laid out plainly—times where things are intentionally less clear so that when you do uncover the truth, it means something to you.

这种有时神秘的方法还有另一个原因。如前所述,游戏设计不是一门精确的科学。它充满了神秘和矛盾。我们的镜头是不完整和不完美的。要成为一名伟大的游戏设计师,仅仅熟悉这本书提供的一套原则是不够的。你必须准备好独立思考,弄清楚为什么某些原则在某些情况下不起作用,并发明你自己的新原则。我们等待着我们的门捷列夫。也许就是你。

There is another reason for this sometimes cryptic approach. As discussed earlier, game design is not an exact science. It is full of mysteries and contradictions. Our set of lenses will be incomplete and imperfect. To become a great game designer, it is not enough to be familiar with the set of principles this book has to offer. You must be ready to think for yourself, to figure out why certain principles don’t work in certain cases, and to invent new principles of your own. We await our Mendeleev. Perhaps it is you.

我为什么讨厌书

Why I Hate Books

我讨厌书籍,因为它们只教人们谈论他们不理解的东西。

—让·雅克·卢梭

I hate books, for they only teach people to talk about what they don’t understand.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

采取平衡的学习和实践方法非常重要。

—达赖喇嘛

It is very important to have a balanced approach to study and practice.

—The Dalai Lama

请不要以为读了这本书或任何一本书就能让你成为游戏设计师,更别说成为一名伟大的游戏设计师了。游戏设计不是一套原则,而是一种活动。你不可能通过读一本书就成为歌手、飞行员或篮球运动员,也不可能通过读一本书就成为游戏设计师。成为游戏设计师只有一条路,那就是设计游戏——更确切地说,设计人们真正喜欢的游戏。这意味着仅仅记下你的游戏想法是不够的。你必须构建游戏,自己玩,并让其他人玩。当它不能令人满意(而且不会令人满意)时,你必须改变它。不断改变它。不断改变它,数十次,直到你创造出一款人们真正喜欢玩的游戏。当你经历过几次之后,你就会开始明白什么是游戏设计。游戏设计师中有一句话:“你的前十个游戏会很糟糕——所以赶快把它们搞定。”本书中的原则将有助于指导你的设计,并为你提供如何更快地做出更好设计的有用观点,但你只有通过实践才能成为一名优秀的设计师。如果你真的不想成为一名优秀的游戏设计师,那就把这本书放下吧。它对你没什么用。但如果你真的想成为一名游戏设计师,那么这本书不是终点,而是起点——一个持续学习、实践、吸收和综合的过程的起点,这个过程将持续你的余生。

Please do not think that reading this book, or any book, will make you into a game designer, much less a great game designer. Game design is not a set of principles, it is an activity. You could no sooner become a singer, pilot, or basketball player by reading a book than you could become a game designer. There is only one path to becoming a game designer, and that is the path of designing games—and more to the point, designing games that people really like. That means that simply jotting down your game idea isn’t enough. You must build the game, play it yourself, and let others play it. When it doesn’t satisfy (and it won’t), you must change it. And change it. And change it again, dozens of times, until you have created a game that people actually enjoy playing. When you have been through this a few times, then you will start to understand what game design is. There’s a saying among game designers: “Your first ten games will suck—so get them out of the way fast.” The principles in this book will help to guide your designs, and give you useful perspectives on how to make better designs faster, but you can only become a good designer through practice. If you are not really interested in becoming a good game designer, put this book down now. It has nothing for you. But if you truly do want to be a game designer, then this book is not an end, but a beginning—the beginning of a continuous process of study, practice, assimilation, and synthesis that is going to last the rest of your life.

第一

CHAPTER ONE

一开始就有设计师

In the Beginning, There Is the Designer



1.1

FIGURE

1.1

魔法词

Magic Words

未来的设计师经常问我:“如何成为一名游戏设计师?”答案很简单:“设计游戏。现在就开始!不要等待!不要结束这次谈话!开始设计!行动!现在!”

Would-be designers often ask me, “How do you become a game designer?” And the answer is easy: “Design games. Start now! Don’t wait! Don’t even finish this conversation! Just start designing! Go! Now!”

其中一些人确实做到了这一点。但许多人都陷入了信心危机,感觉自己陷入了困境:如果只有游戏设计师才能设计游戏,而且只有通过设计游戏才能成为游戏设计师,那么还有谁能开始呢?如果你有这种感觉,答案很简单。只要说出这些神奇的话:

And some of them do just that. But many have a crisis of confidence and feel stuck in a catch-22: If only game designers can design games and you can only become a game designer by designing games, how can anyone ever get started? If this is how you feel, the answer is easy. Just say these magic words:

我是一名游戏设计师。

I am a game designer.

我是认真的。现在就大声说出来。别害羞——这里除了我们,没有别人。

I’m serious. Say them out loud, right now. Don’t be shy—there’s no one here but us.

你做到了吗?如果做到了,恭喜你。你现在是一名游戏设计师。此刻,你可能会觉得自己还不是真正的游戏设计师,只是在假装自己是游戏设计师。这没关系,因为正如我们稍后将探讨的那样,人们会成为他们假装的样子。只要继续假装,做你认为游戏设计师会做的事情,不久,你会惊讶地发现你就是游戏设计师。如果你的信心动摇了,只需再次重复这句神奇的话:我是一名游戏设计师。有时,我会这样重复它们:

Did you do it? If so, congratulations. You are now a game designer. You might feel, at this moment, that you aren’t really a game designer yet, but that you’re just pretending to be one. And that’s fine, because as we’ll explore later, people become what they pretend to be. Just go on pretending, doing the things you think a game designer would do, and before long, to your surprise, you will find you are one. If your confidence wavers, just repeat the magic words again: I am a game designer. Sometimes, I repeat them like this:

  • 你是谁?

  • Who are you?

  • 我是一名游戏设计师。

  • I am a game designer.

  • 不你不是。

  • No, you’re not.

  • 一名游戏设计师。

  • I am a game designer.

  • 什么样的设计师?

  • What kind of a designer?

  • 我是一名游戏设计师。

  • I am a game designer.

  • 你的意思是你玩游戏。

  • You mean you play games.

  • 我是一名游戏设计师

  • I am a game designer.

这种建立信心的游戏乍一看可能很愚蠢。但这绝不是你作为一名设计师会做的最愚蠢的事情。而且,善于建立信心非常重要,因为对自己能力的怀疑将永远困扰着你。作为一名新手设计师,你会想,“我从来没有做过这件事——我不知道自己在做什么。”一旦你有了一点经验,你就会想,“我的技能太狭窄了——这个新头衔不一样。也许我上次只是运气好。”当你成为一名经验丰富的设计师时,你会想,“现在的世界不同了。也许我失去了我的触觉。”

This game of confidence building may seem silly at first. But it is far from the silliest thing you will do as a designer. And it is terribly important that you get good at building your confidence, for doubts about your abilities will forever plague you. As a novice designer, you will think, “I’ve never done this—I don’t know what I’m doing.” Once you have a little experience, you will think, “My skills are so narrow—this new title is different. Maybe I just got lucky last time.” And when you are a seasoned designer, you will think, “The world is different now. Maybe I’ve lost my touch.”

抛开这些无用的想法。它们帮不了你。当必须尝试做某件事时,你绝不能考虑可能性或不可能性。如果你看看那些伟大的创意头脑,你会发现他们都有一个共同点:他们不怕被嘲笑。一些最伟大的创新来自那些成功的人,他们太愚蠢了,不知道自己在做的事情是不可能的。游戏设计就是决策,决策必须充满信心。

Blow away these useless thoughts. They can’t help you. When a thing must be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. If you look at the great creative minds, all so different, you will find they have one thing in common: they lack a fear of ridicule. Some of the greatest innovations have come from people who only succeeded because they were too dumb to know that what they were doing was impossible. Game design is decision making, and decisions must be made with confidence.

你会失败吗?是的,你会。你会一次又一次地失败。你失败的次数会比成功的次数多很多。但这些失败是你成功的唯一途径。你会爱上你的失败,因为每一次失败都会让你更接近一个真正非凡的游戏。杂耍艺人中有这样一句话:“如果你没有失败,你就没有学习。如果你没有学习,你就不是杂耍艺人。”游戏设计也是如此:如果你没有失败,你就没有足够努力,你就不是真正的游戏设计师。

Will you fail sometimes? Yes, you will. You will fail again, and again, and again. You will fail many, many more times than you will succeed. But these failures are your only path to success. You will come to love your failures, because each failure brings you a step closer to a truly phenomenal game. There is a saying among jugglers: “If you aren’t dropping, you aren’t learning. And if you aren’t learning, you aren’t a juggler.” The same is true for game design: If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough, and you aren’t really a game designer.

游戏设计师需要哪些技能?

What Skills Does a Game Designer Need?

我已把一切知识视为自己的领域。

-法式培根

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

—Francis Bacon

简而言之,所有技能。几乎任何你擅长的技能都可以成为游戏设计师的有用技能。以下是一些按字母顺序排列的重要技能:

In short, all of them. Almost anything that you can be good at can become a useful skill for a game designer. Here are some of the big ones, listed alphabetically:

  • 动画:现代游戏中充满了需要看起来栩栩如生的角色。“动画”一词本身的意思是“赋予生命”。了解角色动画的力量和局限性将让您打开世界尚未看到的巧妙游戏设计理念之门。

  • Animation: Modern games are full of characters that need to seem alive. The very word “animation” means “to give life.” Understanding the powers and limits of character animation will let you open the door for clever game design ideas the world has yet to see.

  • 人类学:您将在自然栖息地研究您的受众,试图了解他们内心的渴望,以便您的游戏能够满足这种渴望。

  • Anthropology: You will be studying your audience in their natural habitat, trying to figure out their heart’s desire, so that your games might satisfy that desire.

  • 建筑:您设计的不只是建筑物;您还将设计整个城市和世界。熟悉建筑世界,即了解人与空间之间的关系,将为您在创建游戏世界方面提供巨大的优势。

  • Architecture: You will be designing more than buildings; you’ll be designing whole cities and worlds. Familiarity with the world of architecture, that is, understanding the relationship between people and spaces, will give you a tremendous leg up in creating game worlds.

  • 头脑风暴:您需要创造数十个甚至数百个新想法。

  • Brainstorming: You will need to create new ideas by the dozens, nay, by the hundreds.

  • 商业:游戏行业就是一个行业。大多数游戏都是为了赚钱而制作的。你对商业的了解越多,你制作梦想游戏的机会就越大。

  • Business: The game industry is just that, an industry. Most games are made to make money. The better you understand the business end of things, the better chance you have of making the game of your dreams.

  • 电影摄影:许多游戏都会有电影。几乎所有现代电子游戏都有虚拟摄像机。如果你想要提供令人感动的体验,你需要了解电影摄影艺术。

  • Cinematography: Many games will have movies in them. Almost all modern videogames have a virtual camera. You need to understand the art of cinematography if you want to deliver an emotionally compelling experience.

  • 沟通:你需要与此处列出的每个学科的人进行交流,甚至更多。你需要解决争议,解决沟通不畅的问题,并了解你的队友、客户和观众对你的游戏的真实感受。

  • Communication: You will need to talk with people in every discipline listed here, and even more. You will need to resolve disputes, solve problems of miscommunication, and learn the truth about how your teammates, your client, and your audience really feel about your game.

  • 创意写作:您将创建整个虚构的世界和其中的居民,并决定在那里发生的事件。

  • Creative writing: You will be creating entire fictional worlds and populations to live in them and deciding the events that will happen there.

  • 经济学:许多现代游戏都具有复杂的游戏资源经济。了解经济学规则可能会大有帮助。

  • Economics: Many modern games feature complex economies of game resources. An understanding of the rules of economics can be surprisingly helpful.

  • 工程:现代电子游戏涉及当今世界上最复杂的工程,有些游戏的代码行数甚至达到数以百万计。新技术创新使新类型的游戏成为可能。创新的游戏设计师必须了解每种技术带来的限制和力量。

  • Engineering: Modern videogames involve some of the most complex engineering in the world today, with some titles counting their lines of code in the millions. New technical innovations make new kinds of gameplay possible. Innovative game designers must understand both the limits and the powers that each technology brings.

  • 游戏:当然,熟悉游戏对你大有裨益,但不仅仅是熟悉你打算创建的游戏类型。你对从 pin the tail on the donkey 到Portal 2等各种游戏的运作方式的了解将为你提供创建新游戏所需的原始材料。

  • Games: Naturally, familiarity with games will be of great use to you, but not just familiarity with the kind of games you intend to create. Your knowledge of the workings of every kind of game from pin the tail on the donkey to Portal 2 will give you the raw materials you need when you create new games.

  • 历史:许多游戏都以历史为背景。即使是以幻想为背景的游戏也能从历史中汲取令人难以置信的灵感。

  • History: Many games are placed in historical settings. Even the ones placed in fantasy settings can draw incredible inspiration from history.

  • 管理:团队共同努力实现目标时,必须进行管理。优秀的设计师即使在管理不善的情况下也能取得成功,秘密地“从下层进行管理”以完成工作。

  • Management: Anytime a team works together toward a goal, there must be some management. Good designers can succeed even when management is bad, secretly “managing from below” to get the job done.

  • 数学:游戏充满了数学、概率、风险分析和复杂的计分系统,更不用说计算机图形学和计算机科学背后的数学。熟练的设计师一定不怕时不时地钻研数学。

  • Mathematics: Games are full of mathematics, probability, risk analyses, and complex scoring systems, not to mention the mathematics that stands behind computer graphics and computer science in general. A skilled designer must not be afraid to delve into math from time to time.

  • 音乐:音乐是心灵的语言。如果您的游戏想要真正打动人心、让他们沉浸其中、让他们沉浸其中,那么音乐是必不可少的。

  • Music: Music is the language of the soul. If your games are going to truly touch people, to immerse, and embrace them, they cannot do it without music.

  • 心理学:你的目标是让人类幸福。你必须了解人类思维的运作方式,否则你就是在黑暗中设计。

  • Psychology: Your goal is to make a human being happy. You must understand the workings of the human mind or you are designing in the dark.

  • 公开演讲:您经常需要向一群人陈述您的想法。有时您会发表演讲以征求他们的反馈意见;有时您会发表演讲以说服他们相信您的新想法是天才之举。无论出于何种原因,您都必须自信、清晰、自然且有趣,否则人们会怀疑您不知道自己在做什么。

  • Public speaking: You will frequently need to present your ideas to a group. Sometimes you will speak to solicit their feedback; sometimes you will speak to persuade them of the genius of your new idea. Whatever the reason, you must be confident, clear, natural, and interesting, or people will be suspicious that you don’t know what you are doing.

  • 声音设计:声音才能真正使人相信它就在某个地方;换句话说,“耳听为实”。

  • Sound design: Sound is what truly convinces the mind that it is in a place; in other words, “hearing is believing.”

  • 技术写作:您需要创建文档来清晰地描述您的复杂设计,而不留下任何漏洞或空白。

  • Technical writing: You need to create documents that clearly describe your complex designs without leaving any holes or gaps.

  • 视觉艺术:您的游戏将充满图形元素。您必须精通图形设计语言,并知道如何使用它来创造您想要的游戏感觉。

  • Visual arts: Your games will be full of graphic elements. You must be fluent in the language of graphic design and know how to use it to create the feeling you want your game to have.

当然,还有很多。令人望而生畏,不是吗?怎么可能有人能掌握所有这些事情?事实是没有人能做到。但是,你习惯处理的事情越多,无论多么不完美,你就会越好,因为只有超越自己的极限,才会成长。这是游戏设计师必须自信无畏的另一个原因。但有一项技能是所有其他技能的关键。

And of course, there are many more. Daunting, isn’t it? How could anyone possibly master all of these things? The truth is that no one can. But the more of these things you are comfortable working with, however imperfectly, the better off you will be, for growth only happens when we exceed our limits. This is another reason that game designers must be confident and fearless. But there is one skill that is the key to all the others.

最重要的技能

The Most Important Skill

在上一节提到的所有技能中,有一项是最重要的,而且对大多数人来说这听起来很奇怪,所以我甚至没有列出它。许多人猜是“创造力”,我认为这可能是第二重要的技能。有些人猜是“批判性思维”或“逻辑”,因为游戏设计是关于决策的。这些确实很重要,但绝不是最重要的技能。

Of all the skills mentioned in the previous section, one is far and away the most important, and it sounds so strange to most people that I didn’t even list it. Many people guess “creativity,” and I would argue that this is probably the second most important skill. Some guess “critical thinking” or “logic,” since game design is about decision making. These are indeed important, but by no means the most important skills.

有人说是“沟通”,这个说法已经很接近了。不幸的是,沟通这个词在过去几个世纪里已经被滥用了。它曾经指的是思想交流,但现在却成了谈话的同义词,比如“我有话要跟你说。”谈话当然是一项重要的技能,但良好的沟通和好的游戏设计植根于更基本、更重要的东西。

Some say “communication,” which starts to get close. The word communication has unfortunately become corrupted over the centuries. It once referred to an exchange of ideas but now has become a synonym for talking, as in “I have something to communicate to you.” Talking is certainly an important skill, but good communication and good game design are rooted in something far more basic and far more important.

聆听。

Listening.

对于游戏设计师来说,最重要的技能就是倾听。

The most important skill for a game designer is listening.

游戏设计师必须倾听很多东西。这些可以分为五大类:团队、受众、游戏、客户和自我。本书的大部分内容将介绍如何倾听这五件事。

Game designers must listen to many things. These can be grouped into five major categories: team, audience, game, client, and self. Most of this book will be about how to listen to these five things.

这听起来可能有点荒谬。倾听难道也是一种技能?我们并没有“耳聋”,我们怎么能不倾听呢?

This may sound absurd to you. Is listening even a skill? We are not equipped with “earlids.” How can we help but listen?

我所说的倾听,并不是指仅仅听对方说了什么。我指的是更深入的倾听,深思熟虑的倾听。例如,你在工作,看到你的朋友弗雷德。你说:“嗨,弗雷德,你好吗?”弗雷德皱起眉头,低下头,不自在地挪动身体,似乎在寻找合适的词语,然后平静地说,没有眼神接触,“呃,我觉得还好。”然后,他镇定下来,深吸一口气,看着你的眼睛,坚定地,但并不令人信服地,稍微大声地说:“我,呃,很好。你好吗?”

By listening, I don’t mean merely hearing what is said. I mean a deeper listening, a thoughtful listening. For example, you are at work, and you see your friend Fred. “Hi Fred, how are you?” you say. Fred frowns, looks down, shifts his weight uncomfortably, seems to be hunting for words, and then says quietly, without eye contact, “Uh, fine, I guess.” And then, he collects himself, takes a breath, and looks you in the eye as he determinedly, but not convincingly, says a little louder, “I’m, uh, fine. How are you?”

那么弗雷德怎么样了?他说:“他很好。”太好了。弗雷德很好。如果你只是“表面听”,你可能会得出这个结论。但如果你更深入地倾听,充分注意弗雷德的肢体语言、微妙的面部表情、语调和手势,你可能会听到一个非常不同的信息:“实际上,我并不好。我有一个严重的问题,我想我可能想和你讨论一下。但除非你承诺真的关心我的问题,否则我不会这么做,因为这有点像个人问题。不过,如果你不想参与其中,我就不会打扰你,我会假装一切都很好。”

So how is Fred? His words say, “He’s fine.” Great. Fred is fine. If you are just “surface listening,” you might draw that conclusion. But if you listen more deeply, paying full attention to Fred’s body language, subtle facial expression, tone of voice, and gestures, you might hear a very different message: “Actually, I’m not fine. I have a serious problem that I think I might want to discuss with you. But I won’t do that unless I get some kind of commitment from you that you really care about my problem, because it is kind of a personal issue. If you don’t want to get involved with it, though, I won’t bother you with it, and I’ll just pretend that everything is okay.”

弗雷德的“我很好”这句话就体现了这一切。如果你认真听他说的话,你就会听得清清楚楚,就像他说出来一样。这就是游戏设计师必须日复一日地倾听,在做出每个决定时都必须倾听的那种声音。

All of that was right there, in Fred’s “I’m fine.” And if you were listening deeply to what he said, you heard it all, clear as a bell, plain as day, as if he’d said it out loud. This is the kind of listening that game designers must engage in, day in and day out, with every decision that they make.

当你认真聆听时,你会观察一切,并不断问自己问题:“是这样吗?”“为什么会这样?”“这是她真正的感受吗?”“现在我知道了,这意味着什么?”

When you listen thoughtfully, you observe everything and constantly ask yourself questions: “Is that right?” “Why is it that way?” “Is this how she really feels?” “Now that I know that, what does it mean?”

游戏设计师 Brian Moriarty 曾经指出,曾经有一段时间我们不使用“listen”这个词,而是说“listen!”这个说法从何而来?那么,当我们倾听时,我们会做什么呢?我们会把头歪向一边——我们的头真的会倾斜,就像海上的船一样。当我们歪向一边时,我们会失去平衡;我们接受不安的可能性。当我们深入倾听时,我们会将自己置于危险的境地。我们接受这样的可能性:我们所听到的东西可能会让我们不安,可能会导致我们所知道的一切相互矛盾。这是开放思想的终极表现。这是了解真相的唯一途径。你必须像孩子一样对待一切,不做任何假设,观察一切,倾听,正如赫尔曼·黑塞在《悉达多》中所描述的那样:

Game designer Brian Moriarty once pointed out that there was a time when we didn’t use the word “listen,” instead we said “list!” And where did this come from? Well, what do we do when we listen? We tip our head to one side—our head literally lists, as a boat at sea. And when we tip to one side, we put ourselves off balance; we accept the possibility of upset. When we listen deeply, we put ourselves in a position of risk. We accept the possibility that what we hear may upset us and may cause everything we know to be contradicted. It is the ultimate in open-mindedness. It is the only way to learn the truth. You must approach everything as a child does, assuming nothing, observing everything, and listening as Herman Hesse describes in Siddhartha:

用一颗静默的心、一颗等待、开放的灵魂去聆听。不带激情、不带欲望、不带评判、不带责备。

To listen with a silent heart, with a waiting, open soul. Without passion, without desire, without judgment, without rebuke.

五种倾听方式

The Five Kinds of Listening

因为游戏设计是一个相互关联的网络,我们将在本书中不断回顾这五种聆听方式并探索它们之间的相互联系。

Because game design is such an interconnected web, we will be visiting and revisiting the five kinds of listening and exploring their interconnections throughout this book.

你需要听取团队的意见(第 26 章和第 27章),因为你将与他们一起开发游戏并做出关键的游戏设计决策。还记得那张长长的技能清单吗?你的团队可能拥有所有这些技能。如果你能认真倾听团队的意见并与他们进行真正的沟通,你们就会像一个整体一样运作,就像你们都拥有相同的技能一样。

You will need to listen to your team (Chapters 26 and 27), since you will be building your game and making crucial game design decisions together with them. Remember that big list of skills? Together, your team might have all of them. If you can listen deeply to your team and truly communicate with them, you will all function as one unit, as if you all shared the same skills.

你需要倾听你的受众第 9 章第 11章、第 24 章第 25 章和33 章),因为这些人将会玩你的游戏。归根结底,如果他们对你的游戏不满意,你就失败了。而了解什么能让他们高兴的唯一方法就是深入倾听他们,比他们自己更了解他们。

You will need to listen to your audience (Chapters 9 through 11, 24, 25, and 33) because these are the people who will be playing your game. Ultimately, if they aren’t happy with your game, you have failed. And the only way to know what will make them happy is to listen to them deeply, getting to know them better than they know themselves.

你需要倾听你的游戏(本书的大多数章节)。这是什么意思?这意味着你将彻底了解你的游戏。就像机械师可以通过倾听引擎的声音来判断汽车出了什么问题一样,你可以通过倾听游戏的玩法来了解游戏出了什么问题。

You will need to listen to your game (most chapters in this book). What does this even mean? It means you will get to know your game inside and out. Like a mechanic who can tell what is wrong with a car by listening to the engine, you will get to know what is wrong with your game by listening to it being played.

你需要倾听客户的意见(第 30 章第 32 章)。客户是付钱让你设计游戏的人,如果你不满足他们的要求,他们就会去找其他能满足他们要求的人。只有深入倾听他们,你才能知道他们内心深处真正想要什么。

You will need to listen to your client (Chapters 30 through 32). The client is the one who is paying you to design the game, and if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll go to someone else who does. Only by listening to them, deeply, will you be able to tell what they really want, deep in their hearts.

最后,你需要倾听自己1 章第 7 章和35 章)。这听起来很容易,但对很多人来说,这是最难的一种倾听方式。然而,如果你能掌握它,它将成为你最强大的工具之一,也是你巨大创造力背后的秘密。

And last, you will need to listen to your self (Chapters 1, 7, and 35). This sounds easy, but for many, it is the most difficult kind of listening. If you can master it, however, it will be one of your most powerful tools and the secret behind your tremendous creativity.

天才的秘密

The Secret of the Gifted

经过这么多花哨的谈话,你的信心可能已经开始消退了。你可能会怀疑游戏设计是否真的适合你。你可能已经注意到熟练的游戏设计师似乎对这项工作有特殊的天赋。对他们来说,这项工作来得轻而易举,自然而然。虽然你喜欢游戏,但你还是会怀疑自己是否有足够的天赋成为一名成功的设计师。好吧,这里有一个关于天赋的小秘密。天赋有两种。首先,有一种天赋是与生俱来的。这是次要的天赋。如果你有这种天赋,那么游戏设计、数学或弹钢琴等技能对你来说就是自然而然的。你可以轻松地做到,几乎不用思考。但你不一定喜欢做这件事。数以百万计的人拥有各种各样的次要天赋,尽管他们技术娴熟,但却从未用他们的天赋做出过什么伟大的事情,这是因为他们缺乏主要天赋。

After all that fancy talk, your confidence might be fading already. You might be wondering whether game design is really for you. You might have noticed that skilled game designers seem to have a special gift for the work. It comes easily and naturally to them, and though you love games, you wonder if you are gifted enough to succeed as a designer. Well, here is a little secret about gifts. There are two kinds. First, there is the innate gift of a given skill. This is the minor gift. If you have this gift, a skill such as game design, mathematics, or playing the piano comes naturally to you. You can do it easily, almost without thinking. But you don’t necessarily enjoy doing it. There are millions of people with minor gifts of all kinds, who, though skilled, never do anything great with their gifted skill, and this is because they lack the major gift.

主要的天赋是对工作的热爱。这似乎有些落后。热爱使用一项技能怎么会比技能本身更重要呢?原因很简单:如果你有主要的天赋,即对设计游戏的热爱,你就会用你有限的技能来设计游戏。你会继续这样做。你对工作的热爱会闪耀出来,让你的工作充满一种难以形容的光彩,而这种光彩只有热爱工作才能产生。通过练习,你的游戏设计技能就像肌肉一样,会不断成长,变得更加强大,直到最终你的技能会和那些只有次要天赋的人一样好,甚至更胜一筹。人们会说:“哇。那人真是个有天赋的游戏设计师。”当然,他们会认为你只有次要天赋,但只有你知道你技能的秘密来源,也就是主要的天赋:对工作的热爱。

The major gift is love of the work. This might seem backward. How can love of using a skill be more important than the skill itself? It is for this simple reason: If you have the major gift, the love of designing games, you will design games using whatever limited skills you have. And you will keep doing it. And your love for the work will shine through, infusing your work with an indescribable glow that only comes from the love of doing it. And through practice, your game design skills, like muscles, will grow and become more powerful, until eventually your skills will be as great, or greater than, those of someone who only has the minor gift. And people will say, “Wow. That one is a truly gifted game designer.” They will think you have the minor gift, of course, but only you will know the secret source of your skill, which is the major gift: love of the work.

但也许你不确定自己是否具有主要天赋。你不确定自己是否真的喜欢游戏设计。我遇到过许多学生,他们开始设计游戏只是为了看看它是什么样的,结果却惊讶地发现,他们真的很喜欢这份工作。我也遇到过那些确信自己注定要成为游戏设计师的人。他们中的一些人甚至有小天赋。但当他们体验到游戏设计的真正感受时,他们意识到这不适合他们。

But maybe you aren’t sure if you have the major gift. You aren’t sure if you truly love game design. I have encountered many students who started designing games just to see what it was like, only to find that to their surprise, they truly love the work. I have also encountered those who were certain that they were destined to be game designers. Some of them even had the minor gift. But when they experienced what game design really was like, they realized it wasn’t for them.

只有一种方法可以确定你是否拥有重大天赋。开始走这条路,看看它是否能让你心花怒放。

There is only one way to find out if you have the major gift. Start down the path, and see if it makes your heart sing.

所以,请念诵你的魔法词语,因为我们将继续前行!

So recite your magic words, for down the path we go!

是一名游戏设计师。

I am a game designer.

一名游戏设计师。

I am a game designer.

我是一名游戏设计师。

I am a game designer.

我是一名游戏设计师

I am a game designer.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 太阳马戏团:火花——点燃我们心中的创造之火,作者:Lyn Heward 和 John U. Bacon。这是一本关于寻找人生道路的精彩小书。

  • Cirque du Soleil: The Spark—Igniting the Creative Fire that Lives within Us All by Lyn Heward and John U. Bacon. This is a wonderful little book about finding your path.

  • 布伦达·布拉斯韦特和伊恩·施赖伯撰写的《游戏设计师面临的挑战》。当你准备锻炼你的游戏设计能力时,这是一个很棒的练习集。

  • Challenges for Game Designers by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber. A magnificent collection of exercises for when you are ready to stretch your game design muscles.

第二

CHAPTER TWO

设计师创造体验

The Designer Creates an Experience



2.1

FIGURE

2.1

我已经知道结局了

这是让你的脸崩溃的部分

我不知道是什么让你的脸崩塌了

但电影就是这样结束的。

—《他们可能是巨人》,实验电影

I already know the ending

it’s the part that makes your face implode

I don’t know what makes your face implode

but that’s the way the movie ends.

—They Might Be Giants, Experimental Film

在心灵、智力或灵魂所受影响的无数影响或印象中,目前我该选择哪一个呢?

—埃德加·爱伦·坡,《创作哲学》

Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?

—Edgar Allen Poe, The Philosophy of Composition

第 1 章中,我们确定了一切始于游戏设计师,并且游戏设计师需要某些技能。现在是时候开始讨论游戏设计师使用这些技能来做什么了。换句话说,我们需要问:“游戏设计师的目标是什么?”首先,答案似乎很明显:游戏设计师的目标是设计游戏。

In Chapter 1, we established that everything begins with the game designer and that the game designer needs certain skills. Now it is time to begin talking about what a game designer uses those skills for. Put another way, we need to ask, “What is the game designer’s goal?” At first, the answer seems obvious: a game designer’s goal is to design games.

但这是错误的。

But this is wrong.

从根本上讲,游戏设计师并不关心游戏。游戏只是达到目的的一种手段。游戏本身只是人工制品——一堆纸板或一袋袋零件。除非人们玩,否则游戏毫无价值。这是为什么呢?玩游戏时会发生什么神奇的事情呢?

Ultimately, a game designer does not care about games. Games are merely a means to an end. On their own, games are just artifacts—clumps of cardboard or bags of bits. Games are worthless unless people play them. Why is this? What magic happens when games are played?

当人们玩游戏时,他们会获得一种体验。设计师关心的就是这种体验。没有这种体验,游戏就毫无价值。

When people play games, they have an experience. It is this experience that the designer cares about. Without the experience, the game is worthless.

我现在就警告你:我们即将进入一个很难谈论的领域,这并不是因为它陌生——事实上,恰恰相反。它很难谈论,因为它太熟悉了。我们所见过的(看看那日落!)、做过的(你坐过飞机吗?)、想过的(为什么天空是蓝色的?)或感受过的(这场雪好冷!)一切都是体验。根据定义,我们不能体验任何不是体验的东西。体验是我们身体中不可或缺的一部分;它们很难去思考(即使思考体验也是一种体验)。但是,尽管我们对体验很熟悉,但它们却很难描述。你看不到它们,触摸不到它们,也拿不住它们——你甚至无法真正分享它们。没有两个人对同一事物会有完全相同的体验——每个人对某事的体验都是完全独特的。

I will warn you right now: we are about to enter territory that is very difficult to talk about, not because it is unfamiliar—in fact, quite the opposite. It is hard to talk about because it is too familiar. Everything we’ve ever seen (look at that sunset!), done (have you ever flown a plane?), thought (why is the sky blue?), or felt (this snow is so cold!) has been an experience. By definition, we can’t experience anything that is not an experience. Experiences are so much a part of us; they are hard to think about (even thinking about experiences is an experience). But as familiar as we are with experiences, they are very hard to describe. You can’t see them, touch them, or hold them—you can’t even really share them. No two people can have identical experiences of the same thing—each person’s experience of something is completely unique.

这就是体验的悖论。从某种程度上说,体验是模糊的,从另一种程度上说,体验就是我们所知道的一切。但尽管体验可能很棘手,但游戏设计师真正关心的就是创造体验。我们不能回避体验,退回到我们物质游戏的具体性中。我们必须用尽一切办法来理解、领悟和掌握人类体验的本质。

And this is the paradox of experiences. On one level, they are shadowy and nebulous, and on another, they are all we know. But as tricky as experiences can be, creating them is all a game designer really cares about. We cannot shy away from them, retreating into the concreteness of our material game. We must use every means we can muster to comprehend, understand, and master the nature of human experience.

游戏不等于体验

The Game Is Not the Experience



2.2

FIGURE

2.2

在继续之前,我们必须绝对清楚这一点。游戏不是体验。游戏可以带来体验,但它不是体验本身。对于某些人来说,这是一个难以理解的概念。古老的禅宗问题直接解决了这个问题:“如果森林里有一棵树倒下,而没有人在那里听到它,它会发出声音吗?”这句话被重复了太多次,听起来有些陈词滥调,但这正是我们要谈论的。如果我们对“声音”的定义是空气分子的振动,那么是的,树会发出声音。如果我们对声音的定义是听到声音的体验,那么答案是否定的,当没有人在那里时,树不会发出声音。作为设计师,我们并不真正关心树和它是如何倒下的——我们只关心听到它的体验。树只是达到目的的一种手段。如果没有人在那里听到它,那么,我们根本不在乎。

We must be absolutely clear on this point before we can proceed. The game is not the experience. The game enables the experience, but it is not the experience. This is a hard concept for some people to grasp. The ancient Zen question addresses this directly: “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” This has been repeated so often that it sounds hackneyed, but it is exactly what we are talking about. If our definition of “sound” is air molecules vibrating, then yes, the tree makes a sound. If our definition of sound is the experience of hearing a sound, then the answer is no, the tree makes no sound when no one is there. As designers, we don’t really care about the tree and how it falls—we care only about the experience of hearing it. The tree is just a means to an end. And if no one is there to hear it, well, we don’t care at all.

游戏设计师只关心看似存在的东西。玩家和游戏都是真实的。体验是虚构的——但游戏设计师的评判标准是这个虚构事物的质量,因为这是人们玩游戏的原因。

Game designers only care about what seems to exist. The player and the game are real. The experience is imaginary—but game designers are judged by the quality of this imaginary thing because it is the reason people play games.

如果我们能够通过某种高科技魔法,直接为人们创造体验,而无需任何底层媒介——没有游戏板、没有电脑、没有屏幕——我们就会这么做。从某种意义上说,这是“人工现实”的梦想——能够创造不受提供体验的媒介限制的体验。这是一个美丽的梦想,但也只是梦想而已。我们无法直接创造体验。也许在遥远的未来,使用难以想象的技术,这样的事情就会发生。时间会告诉我们答案。现在,我们生活在当下,我们所能做的就是创造一些人工制品(规则集、游戏板、计算机程序),当玩家与它们互动时,这些人工制品可能会创造某些类型的体验。

If we could, through some high-tech magic, create experiences for people directly, with no underlying media—no game boards, no computers, no screens—we would do it. In a sense, this is the dream of “artificial reality”—to be able to create experiences that are in no way limited by the constraints of the medium that delivers the experiences. It is a beautiful dream, but only a dream. We cannot create experiences directly. Perhaps in the distant future, using technologies hard to imagine, such a thing could happen. Time will tell. For now, we live in the present, where all we can do is create artifacts (rule sets, game boards, computer programs) that are likely to create certain kinds of experiences when a player interacts with them.

正是这一点让游戏设计变得如此困难。就像在瓶子里造船一样,我们与真正想要创造的东西相去甚远。我们创造了一个玩家可以互动的物品,并祈祷在互动过程中发生的体验是他们会喜欢的。我们从来没有真正查看我们工作的成果,因为这是其他人的经历,并且最终无法分享。

And it is this that makes game design so very hard. Like building a ship in a bottle, we are far removed from what we are actually trying to create. We create an artifact that a player interacts with and cross our fingers that the experience that takes place during that interaction is something they will enjoy. We never truly see the output of our work, since it is an experience had by someone else and, ultimately, unsharable.

这就是为什么深度聆听对于游戏设计如此重要。

This is why deep listening is so essential for game design.

这是游戏独有的吗?

Is This Unique to Games?

你可能会问,与其他需要我们投入所有这些触感体验的体验相比,游戏有什么特别之处。实际上,从某种程度上来说,游戏在这方面没有什么特别之处。所有类型的娱乐(书籍、电影、戏剧、音乐、游乐设施等)的设计师都必须应对同样的问题:如何创造出一种在人们与之互动时会产生特定体验的东西?

You might well ask what is so special about games, compared to other types of experiences, that require us to get into all of this touchy-feely experience stuff. And really, on one level, there is nothing special about games in this regard. Designers of all types of entertainment—books, movies, plays, music, rides, everything—have to cope with the same issue: How can you create something that will generate a certain experience when a person interacts with it?

但是,对于游戏设计来说,产品和体验之间的区别比其他类型的娱乐更加明显,原因却不那么明显。游戏设计师必须应对比线性体验设计师更多的互动。书籍或剧本的作者设计的是线性体验。他们创造的内容与读者或观众的体验之间存在相当直接的映射。游戏设计师就没有那么容易了。我们让玩家对体验中的事件节奏和顺序有很大的控制权。我们甚至会加入随机事件!这使得产品和体验之间的区别比线性娱乐更加明显。但与此同时,这也使得确定玩家脑海中真正会出现什么样的体验变得更加困难。

But the split between artifact and experience is much more obvious for game design than it is for other types of entertainment, for a not-so-obvious reason. Game designers have to cope with much more interaction than the designers of more linear experiences. The author of a book or screenplay is designing a linear experience. There is a fairly direct mapping between what they create and what the reader or viewer experiences. Game designers don’t have it so easy. We give the player a great deal of control over the pacing and sequence of events in the experience. We even throw in random events! This makes the distinction between artifact and experience much more obvious than it is for linear entertainment. At the same time, though, it makes it much harder to be certain just what experience is really going to arise in the mind of the player.

那么,我们为什么要这么做呢?游戏体验有什么特别之处,以至于我们要放弃线性娱乐者所享有的控制奢侈?我们只是受虐狂吗?我们只是为了挑战而这么做吗?不。就像游戏设计师所做的其他一切一样,我们这样做是为了创造体验。有一些感觉:选择的感觉、自由的感觉、责任感、成就感、友谊的感觉,等等,似乎只有基于游戏的体验才能提供。这就是我们不辞辛劳的原因——创造无法通过其他方式获得的体验。

So, why do we do it? What is so special about game experiences that we would give up the luxuries of control that linear entertainers enjoy? Are we simply masochists? Do we just do it for the challenge? No. As with everything else game designers do, we do it for the experience it creates. There are certain feelings: feelings of choice, feelings of freedom, feelings of responsibility, feelings of accomplishment, feelings of friendship, and many others, which only game-based experiences seem to offer. This is why we go through all the trouble—to generate experiences that can be had no other way.

追逐彩虹的三种实用方法

Three Practical Approaches to Chasing Rainbows

这里没有规则!我们正在努力完成某件事!

-托马斯·爱迪生

There ain’t no rules around here! We’re trying to accomplish something!

—Thomas Edison

因此,我们已经确定了我们需要做什么——创造能够带来精彩、引人入胜、令人难忘体验的游戏。要做到这一点,我们必须着手一项艰巨的任务:揭开人类思维的奥秘和人类心灵的秘密。没有一个研究领域能够做到这一点完美地描绘了这一领域(门捷列夫,你在哪里?),但几个不同的领域已经设法描绘了其中的部分。其中三个领域尤为突出:心理学、人类学和设计。心理学家希望了解让人们动起来的机制,人类学家希望从人性的角度了解人们,而设计师只是想让人们快乐。我们将使用从这三个领域借用的方法,所以让我们考虑一下每个领域能为我们提供什么。

So—we’ve established what we need to do—create games that will somehow generate wonderful, compelling, memorable experiences. To do this, we must embark on a daunting endeavor: to uncover both the mysteries of the human mind and the secrets of the human heart. No one field of study has managed to perfectly map this territory (Mendeleev, where are you?), but several different fields have managed to map out parts of it. Three, in particular, stand out: psychology, anthropology, and design. Psychologists want to understand the mechanisms that make people tick, anthropologists want to understand people on a human level, and designers just want to make people happy. We will be using approaches borrowed from all three of these fields, so let’s consider what each one has to offer us.

心理学

Psychology

除了心理学家,还有谁比研究控制人类思维机制的科学家更适合让我们了解人类体验的本质呢?事实上,他们确实在思维方面取得了一些非常有用的发现,其中一些将在本书中介绍。事实上,你可能会认为,我们对如何创造伟大人类体验的探索可能就此结束,心理学家应该有所有的答案。可悲的是,事实并非如此。因为他们是科学家,所以他们被迫在真实和可证明的领域工作。20 世纪初,心理学​​出现了分裂。一方是行为主义者,他们只关注可测量的行为,采用“黑箱”方法研究思维。他们的主要工具是客观的、受控的实验。另一方是现象学家,他们研究游戏设计师最关心的东西——人类体验的本质和“发生的事情的感觉”。他们的主要工具是内省——在体验发生时检查你的体验的行为。

Who better for us to learn the nature of human experience from than psychologists, the scientists who study the mechanisms that govern the human mind? And truly, they have made some discoveries about the mind that are incredibly useful, some of which will be covered in this book. In fact, you might expect that our quest for understanding how to create great human experiences might end right here and that the psychologists should have all the answers. Sadly, this is not the case. Because they are scientists, they are forced to work in the realm of what is real and provable. Early in the twentieth century, a schism in psychology developed. On one side of the battle were the behaviorists who focused only on measurable behavior, taking a “black box” approach to the study of the mind. Their primary tool was objective, controlled experimentation. On the other side were the phenomenologists, who study what game designers care about most—the nature of human experience and “the feeling of what happens.” Their primary tool was introspection—the act of examining your experiences as they happen.

不幸的是,行为主义者最终胜出,而且理由充分。行为主义者注重客观、可重复的实验,这使得科学研究非常出色。一个行为主义者可以做一个实验,发表一篇论文,其他行为主义者可以在相同条件下重复这个实验,几乎肯定会得到相同的结果。另一方面,现象学方法必然是主观的。经验本身无法直接测量——只能描述,而且描述得不完美。当一个实验在你的脑海中进行时,你怎么能确定实验条件是受控的呢?研究我们内心的想法和感受虽然很有趣也很有用,但它却使科学研究变得不可靠。因此,尽管现代心理学取得了很大进展,但它通常觉得有义务回避我们最关心的事情——人类经验的本质。

Unfortunately for us, the behaviorists won out and for very good reasons. The behavioristic focus on objective, repeatable experiments makes for very good science. One behaviorist can do an experiment, publish a paper about it, and other behaviorists can repeat the experiment under the same conditions, almost certainly getting the same results. The phenomenological approach, on the other hand, is necessarily subjective. Experiences themselves cannot be directly measured—only described and described imperfectly. When an experiment takes place in your mind, how can you possibly be sure the experimental conditions are controlled? As fascinating and useful as it might be to study our own internal thoughts and feelings, it makes for shaky science. As a result, for as much progress that has been made by modern psychology, it generally feels obligated to avoid the thing we care about the most—the nature of human experience.

虽然心理学并不能提供我们需要的所有答案,但它确实提供了一些非常有用的答案,正如我们将看到的。不仅如此,它还提供了我们可以非常有效地使用的方法。游戏设计师不受良好科学的严格责任的约束,可以利用行为主义实验和现象学内省来了解我们需要知道的东西,因为最终,作为设计师,我们是不关心客观现实世界中绝对真实的事情,而只关心主观经验世界中看似真实的事情。

Though psychology does not have all the answers we need, it does provide some very useful ones, as we’ll see. More than that, it provides approaches we can use quite effectively. Not bound by the strict responsibilities of good science, game designers can make use of both behavioristic experiments and phenomenological introspection to learn what we need to know, since ultimately, as designers, we are not concerned with what is definitely true in the world of objective reality but only with what seems to be true in the world of subjective experience.

但也许存在另一种介于行为主义和现象学两个极端之间的科学方法?

But perhaps there is another scientific approach that lies somewhere between the two extremes of behaviorism and phenomenology?

人类学

Anthropology

人类学是科学中最具有人文主义色彩的学科,也是人文学科中最具有科学性的学科。

—阿尔弗雷德·L·克鲁伯

Anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.

—Alfred L. Kroeber

人类学是研究人类及其思想和行为的另一个主要分支。它比心理学采用更全面的方法,研究人类的一切,包括他们的身体、心理和文化方面。它非常关注研究世界各民族之间的相似之处和差异,不仅是今天,而且是整个历史。

Anthropology is another major branch of study about human beings and what they think and do. It takes a much more holistic approach than psychology, looking at everything about people including their physical, mental, and cultural aspects. It is very concerned with studying the similarities and differences between the various peoples of the world, not just today, but throughout history.

游戏设计师特别感兴趣的是文化人类学的方法,即研究现存人类的生活方式,主要通过实地考察进行。文化人类学家与他们的研究对象生活在一起,并试图完全沉浸在他们试图了解的人的世界中。他们努力客观观察文化和习俗,但同时,他们进行内省,并竭尽全力将自己置于研究对象的立场上。这有助于人类学家更好地想象成为他们的研究对象的“感觉”。

Of particular interest to game designers is the approach of cultural anthropology, which is the study of living peoples’ ways of life, mostly through fieldwork. Cultural anthropologists live with their subjects of study and try to immerse themselves completely in the world of the people they are trying to learn about. They strive for objective observation of culture and practices, but at the same time, they engage in introspection and take great pains to put themselves in the place of their subjects. This helps the anthropologist better imagine what it “feels like” to be their subjects.

我们可以从人类学家的工作中了解到许多有关人性的重要知识,但更重要的是,通过采取文化人类学家的方法来了解我们的玩家,采访他们,了解他们一切我们能了解的事情,并将我们自己置于他们的立场,我们可以获得从更客观的角度不可能获得的见解。

We can learn a number of important things about human nature from the work of anthropologists—but much more important, by taking a cultural anthropologist’s approach to our players, interviewing them, learning everything we can about them, and putting ourselves in their place, we can gain insights that would not have been possible from a more objective point of view.

设计

Design

第三个对人类体验进行重要研究的领域,毫无疑问是设计领域。我们将能够从几乎所有类型的设计师那里学到有用的东西:音乐家、建筑师、作家、电影制作人、工业设计师、网页设计师、编舞师、视觉设计师等等。来自这些不同学科的各种各样的设计“经验法则”很好地说明了有关人类体验的有用原则。但不幸的是,这些原则往往很难被我们运用。与科学家不同,设计师很少发表关于他们发现的论文。各个领域最优秀的设计师通常对其他设计领域的运作知之甚少。音乐家可能对节奏了解很多,但可能很少考虑节奏原则如何应用于非音乐的东西,比如小说或舞台剧,尽管它们可能具有有意义的实际应用,因为它们最终都植根于同一个地方——人类的思想。因此,要使用其他设计领域的原则,我们需要广撒网。任何创造出人们应该体验和享受的东西的人都有一些东西可以教给我们,所以我们会从各种类型的设计师那里汲取规则和例子,尽可能地“亲外”。

The third field that has made important study of human experience is, not surprisingly, the field of design. We will be able to learn useful things from almost every kind of designer: musicians, architects, authors, filmmakers, industrial designers, web designers, choreographers, visual designers, and many more. The incredible variety of design “rules of thumb” that comes from these different disciplines does an excellent job of illustrating useful principles about human experience. But unfortunately, these principles can often be hard for us to use. Unlike scientists, designers seldom publish papers about their discoveries. The very best designers in various fields often know little about the workings of other fields of design. The musician may know a lot about rhythm but probably has given little thought to how the principles of rhythm might apply to something nonmusical, such as a novel or stage play, even though they may have meaningful practical application there, since they are ultimately rooted in the same place—the human mind. So, to use principles from other areas of design, we will need to cast a wide net. Anyone who creates something that people are meant to experience and enjoy has something to teach us, and so we will pull rules and examples from designers of every stripe, being as “xenophilic” as possible.

理想情况下,我们会找到方法,通过心理学和人类学的共同基础将所有不同的设计原则相互联系起来,因为最终所有设计原则都植根于此。在某些小方面,我们将在这本书中做到这一点。也许有一天,这三个领域会找到一种方法来统一它们的所有原则。目前,我们需要满足于在这里和那里建立一些桥梁——这不是一个小成就,因为这三个领域很少有太多的交叉授粉。此外,一些桥梁将被证明非常有用!我们面临的任务,游戏设计,是如此困难,以至于我们不能对自己获得知识的来源感到自命不凡。这些方法都不能解决我们所有的问题,所以我们会将它们混合搭配,尝试适当地使用它们,就像我们使用工具箱中的工具一样。我们必须既思想开放又务实——好主意可以来自任何地方,但只有当它们能帮助我们创造更好的体验时,它们才对我们有益。

Ideally, we would find ways to connect all the varied principles of design to each other through the common ground of psychology and anthropology, since ultimately all design principles are rooted in these. In some small ways, we will do that in this book. Perhaps one day these three fields will find a way to unify all their principles. For now, we will need to be content with building a few bridges here and there—this is no small accomplishment, since these are three fields that seldom have much cross-pollination. Further, some of the bridges will prove to be surprisingly useful! The task before us, game design, is so difficult that we cannot afford to be snobbish about where we get our knowledge. None of these approaches can solve all our problems, so we will mix and match them, trying to use them appropriately, like we might use tools from a toolbox. We must be both open-minded and practical—good ideas can come from anywhere, but they are only good for us if they help us create better experiences.

自省:力量、危险和实践

Introspection: Powers, Perils, and Practice

一位专注的科学家从来不会犹豫在自己身上做实验。

—芬顿·克莱普尔

A dedicated scientist never hesitates to experiment on himself.

—Fenton Claypool

我们已经讨论了一些可以找到掌握人类经验的有用工具的地方。现在让我们关注这三个学科都使用过的一个工具:内省。这是一个看似简单的行为,检查你自己的想法和感受——也就是你自己的经历。虽然你永远无法真正了解别人的经历,但你肯定可以了解你自己的经历。从某种意义上说,这就是你所能知道的一切。通过深入倾听你自己,即观察、评估和描述你自己的经历,你可以快速、果断地判断你的游戏中什么有效,什么无效,以及为什么有效或无效。

We have discussed some of the places to find useful tools for mastering human experience. Let’s now focus on one tool that has been used by all three disciplines: introspection. This is the seemingly simple act of examining your own thoughts and feelings—that is, your own experiences. While it is true you can never truly know the experience of another, you certainly can know your own. In one sense, it is all you can know. By deeply listening to your own self, that is, observing, evaluating, and describing your own experiences, you can make rapid, decisive judgments about what is and is not working in your game and why it is or is not working.

“但是等等,”你可能会说。“自省真的是个好主意吗?如果它对科学家来说还不够好,为什么对我们来说就足够了?”这是一个合理的问题。使用自省有两个主要危险。

“But wait,” you might say. “Is introspection really such a good idea? If it isn’t good enough for the scientists, why is it good enough for us?” And this is a fair question. There are two main perils associated with using introspection.

危险一:自省可能导致对现实的错误结论

Peril #1: Introspection Can Lead to False Conclusions about Reality

这是科学家拒绝将内省作为一种有效探究方法的主要原因。多年来,许多伪科学家提出了一些荒唐的理论主要基于内省。这种情况之所以经常发生,是因为在我们的个人经历中看似正确的东西不一定是真的。例如,苏格拉底指出,当我们学习新东西时,我们常常感觉我们一直都知道,而在学习过程中,感觉好像我们只是想起了我们已经知道但忘记的东西。这是一个有趣的观察,大多数人都能记住这种学习经历。但苏格拉底走得太远了,他提出了一个复杂的论点,既然学习可以感觉像回忆,那么我们一定是转世的灵魂,现在才想起我们前世学到的东西。

This is the scientists’ main reason to reject introspection as a valid method of inquiry. Many pseudoscientists over the years have come up with crackpot theories based mainly on introspection. This happens so often because what seems to be true in our personal experience is not necessarily really true. Socrates, for example, noted that when we learn something new, it often feels like we knew it all along and that in learning it, it feels as if we were just reminded of something we already knew but had forgotten. This is an interesting observation, and most people can remember a learning experience that felt this way. But Socrates then goes too far and forms an elaborate argument that since learning can feel like recollection, we must then be reincarnated souls who are just now remembering what we learned in past lives.

这就是基于内省得出关于现实的结论的问题——仅仅因为某件事感觉正确,并不意味着它就是正确的。人们很容易陷入建立可疑逻辑结构来支持感觉一定是正确的事情的陷阱。科学家学会了自律,避免陷入这种陷阱。内省在科学中当然有其地位——它允许人们从单纯的逻辑所不允许的角度来审视问题。优秀的科学家一直在使用内省——但他们不会从中得出科学结论。

This is the problem with drawing conclusions about reality based on introspection—just because something feels true, it doesn’t mean it is true. People very easily fall into the trap of building up structures of questionable logic to back up something that feels like it must be true. Scientists learn to be disciplined about avoiding this trap. Introspection certainly has its place in science—it allows one to examine a problem from points of view that mere logic won’t allow. Good scientists use introspection all the time—but they don’t draw scientific conclusions from it.

幸运的是,游戏设计不是科学!虽然“关于现实的客观事实”很有趣,有时对我们来说也很有用,但我们主要关心的是“感觉上是真实的”。亚里士多德给了我们另一个完美地说明这一点的经典例子。他写了许多关于各种主题的作品,例如逻辑、物理、自然历史和哲学。他以个人内省的深度而闻名,当我们研究他的作品时,我们会发现一些有趣的东西。他关于物理和自然历史的想法今天在很大程度上被否定了。为什么?因为他过于依赖感觉真实的东西,而对受控实验的依赖不够。他的内省使他得出了各种我们现在知道是错误的结论,例如:

Fortunately for us, game design is not science! While “objective truth about reality” is interesting and sometimes useful to us, we primarily care about what “feels like it is true.” Aristotle gives us another classical example that illustrates this perfectly. He wrote a number of works on a variety of topics, such as logic, physics, natural history, and philosophy. He is famous for the depth of his personal introspection, and when we examine his works, we find something interesting. His ideas about physics and natural history are largely discredited today. Why? Because he relied too much on what felt true and not enough on controlled experiments. His introspection led him to all kinds of conclusions we now know to be false, such as the following:

  • 较重的物体比较轻的物体下落得更快。

  • Heavier objects fall faster than light ones.

  • 意识的所在地是在心脏。

  • The seat of consciousness is in the heart.

  • 生命是自然发生的。

  • Life arises by spontaneous generation.

那么,为什么我们会把他看作天才而不是疯子呢?因为他的其他著作,关于形而上学、戏剧、伦理学和心灵,至今仍然有用。在这些领域,感觉真实比客观可证明的真实更重要,他通过深刻反思得出的大多数结论,在数千年后经得起检验。

So why do we remember him as a genius and not as a crackpot? Because his other works, about metaphysics, drama, ethics, and the mind, are still useful today. In these areas where what feels true matters more than what is objectively, provably true, most of his conclusions, reached through deep introspection, stand up to scrutiny thousands of years later.

这里的教训很简单:在处理人类的心灵和思想并试图理解体验和事物的感受时,内省是一种非常强大且值得信赖的工具。作为游戏设计师,我们不需要太担心这个第一个危险。我们更关心事物的感觉,而不是什么是真实的。正因为如此,我们在对体验质量做出结论时,通常可以自信地相信自己的感觉和直觉。

The lesson here is simple: when dealing with the human heart and mind and trying to understand experience and what things feel like, introspection is an incredibly powerful and trustworthy tool. As game designers, we don’t need to worry much about this first peril. We care more about how things feel and less about what is really true. Because of this, we can often confidently trust our feelings and instincts when making conclusions about the quality of an experience.

危险二:我的经历不一定适合别人

Peril #2: What Is True of My Experiences May Not Be True for Others

我们必须认真对待内省的第二个危险。面对第一个危险,我们得到了一张“免于牢狱之灾”的卡片,因为我们是设计师,不是科学家。但是,我们无法轻易摆脱这个危险。这个危险是主观性的危险,也是许多设计师陷入陷阱的地方:“我喜欢玩这个游戏;因此,它一定很好。”有时,这是正确的。但其他时候,如果观众的品味与你自己的品味不同,那就非常非常错误了。一些设计师对此持极端立场,从“我只为像我这样的人设计,因为这是我能确保我的游戏好玩的唯一方法”到“内省和主观意见不可信。只有游戏测试才可信”。这些都是“安全”的立场,但也有其局限性和问题:

This second danger of introspection is the one we must take seriously. With the first peril, we got a “Get Out of Jail Free” card because we are designers, not scientists. But we can’t get away from this one so easily. This peril is the peril of subjectivity and a place where many designers fall into a trap: “I like playing this game; therefore, it must be good.” And sometimes, this is right. But other times, if the audience has tastes that differ from your own, it is very, very wrong. Some designers take extreme positions on this ranging from “I will only design for people like me, because it is the only way I can be sure my game is good” to “introspection and subjective opinions can’t be trusted. Only playtesting can be trusted.” Each of these is a “safe” position but also has its limits and problems:

我只为像我这样的人设计”有这些问题:

I only design for people like me” has these problems:

  • 游戏设计师的品味往往与众不同。可能没有足够多的人像你一样让你的游戏成为值得投资的游戏。

  • Game designers tend to have unusual tastes. There may not be enough people like you out there to make your game a worthwhile investment.

  • 您不会独自进行设计或开发。如果不同的团队成员对于最佳方案有不同的想法,那么这些问题可能很难解决。

  • You won’t be designing or developing alone. If different team members have different ideas about what is best, they can be hard to resolve.

  • 有许多种类的游戏和观众对你来说是完全禁止的。

  • There are many kinds of games and audiences that will be completely off limits to you.

个人意见不可信”存在以下问题:

Personal opinions can’t be trusted” has these problems:

  • 你不能把所有决定都留给游戏测试,尤其是在早期,当还没有游戏可以测试时。此时,必须有人对好坏发表个人意见。

  • You can’t leave every decision to playtesting, especially early in the process, when there is no game yet to playtest. At this point, someone has to exert a personal opinion about what is good and bad.

  • 在游戏完全完成之前,游戏测试员可能会拒绝一个不寻常的想法。他们有时需要看到游戏完成之后才能真正欣赏它。如果你不相信自己对好坏的感觉,你可能会按照游戏测试员的建议,抛弃一只本来可以长成美丽天鹅的“丑小鸭”。

  • Before a game is completely finished, playtesters may reject an unusual idea. They sometimes need to see it completed before they can really appreciate it. If you don’t trust your own feelings about what is good and bad, you may, at the advice of your playtesters, throw out an “ugly duckling” that could have grown up to be a beautiful swan.

  • 游戏测试只能偶尔进行。重要的游戏设计决策必须每天做出。

  • Playtesting can only happen occasionally. Important game design decisions must be made on a daily basis.

摆脱这种危险的方法,无需诉诸这种极端的限制,同样是倾听。游戏设计的内省是一个不仅倾听自己,而且倾听他人的过程。通过观察自己的经历,然后观察他人,并尝试将自己置于他人的位置,你开始形成一幅画面,了解你的经历与他们的经历有何不同。一旦你清楚地了解了这些差异,你就可以像文化人类学家一样,开始将自己置于他人的位置。站在观众的角度,预测他们会喜欢和不喜欢哪些体验。这是一门需要练习的微妙艺术——通过练习,你的技巧会提高。

The way out of this peril, without resorting to such limiting extremes, is again to listen. Introspection for game design is a process of not just listening to yourself but also listening to others. By observing your own experiences, and then observing others, and trying to put yourself in their place, you start to develop a picture of how your experiences differ from theirs. Once you have a clear picture of these differences, you can, like a cultural anthropologist, start to put yourself in the place of your audience and make predictions about what experiences they will and will not enjoy. It is a delicate art that must be practiced—and with practice, your skill at it will improve.

剖析你的感受

Dissect Your Feelings

在无形世界中工作至少要像在有形世界中工作一样努力。

—鲁米

Work in the invisible world at least as hard as you do in the visible.

—Rumi

了解你的感受并不是一件简单的事情。对于设计师来说,仅仅对自己是否喜欢某样东西有一个大致的了解是不够的。你必须能够清楚地说出你喜欢什么,不喜欢什么,以及为什么。我大学时的一个朋友在这方面表现得很糟糕。我们经常会因为以下这样的对话而让对方抓狂:

It is not such a simple thing to know your feelings. It is not enough for a designer to simply have a general sense about whether they like something or not. You must be able to clearly state what you like, what you don’t like, and why. A friend of mine in college was notoriously bad at this. We would frequently drive each other crazy with conversations like the following:

我:你今天在食堂吃了什么?

Me: What did you eat at the cafeteria today?

他:披萨。太难吃了。

Him: Pizza. It was bad.

我:糟糕?有什么糟糕的地方吗?

Me: Bad? What was bad about it?

他:这真是……糟糕。

Him: It was just … bad.

我:你的意思是它太冷了?太硬了?太湿了?太苦了?酱汁太多了?酱汁不够?奶酪味太重了?它有什么不好的?

Me: Do you mean it was too cold? Too hard? Too soggy? Too bitter? Too much sauce? Not enough sauce? Too cheesy? What was bad about it?

他:我不知道——感觉太糟糕了!

Him: I don’t know—it was just bad!

他根本无法清晰地剖析自己的体验。就披萨而言,他知道自己不喜欢披萨,但无法(或者懒得)分析这种体验,以至于无法就如何改进披萨提出有用的建议。这种体验剖析是你内省的主要目标——这是设计师必须做的事情。当你玩游戏时,你必须能够分析它给你带来的感受、它让你想到了什么以及它让你做了什么。你必须能够清楚地陈述这种分析。你必须用语言来表达,因为感受是抽象的,而语言是具体的,你需要这种具体性来向别人描述你希望你的游戏产生的体验。你不仅在设计和玩自己的游戏时需要进行这种分析,在玩别人制作的游戏时也需要进行这种分析。事实上,你应该能够分析你可能拥有的任何体验。你对自己的体验分析得越多,你就越能清楚地思考你的游戏应该创造什么样的体验。

He was simply unable to clearly dissect his experiences. In the case of the pizza, he knew he didn’t like it but was unable to (or didn’t bother to) analyze the experience to the point where he could make useful suggestions about how the pizza might improve. This kind of experience dissection is a main goal of your introspection—it is something designers must do. When you play a game, you must be able to analyze how it made you feel, what it made you think of, and what it made you do. You must be able to state this analysis clearly. You must put words to it, for feelings are abstract, but words are concrete, and you will need this concreteness to describe to others the experiences you want your game to produce. You need to do this kind of analysis not only when designing and playing your own games but also when playing games other people have created. In fact, you should be able to analyze any experience you might have. The more you analyze your own experiences, the more clearly you will be able to think about the kinds of experiences your games should create.

我们有一个专门的词来形容从内心涌现的感受:情绪。我们的逻辑思维很容易将情绪视为不重要,但它们是所有难忘体验的基础。为了让我们永远不会忘记情绪对于体验设计的重要性,让我们将它们作为我们的第一个视角。

We have a special word for the feelings that rise up from within us: emotions. Our logical mind can easily dismiss emotions as unimportant, but they are the foundation of all memorable experience. So that we never forget the importance of emotions for experience design, let’s make them our first lens.

击败海森堡

Defeating Heisenberg

但是,内省还面临更大的挑战。既然观察行为本身就是一种体验,我们如何才能观察自己的体验而不污染它们?我们经常面临这个问题。试着观察你在电脑键盘上打字时的手指在做什么,你很快就会发现自己打字很慢,而且会犯很多错误,即使你还能打字。试着观察自己享受电影或游戏的过程,乐趣很快就会消失。一些人称之为“分析瘫痪”,另一些人称之为海森堡原理。这个原理参考了量子力学中的海森堡不确定性原理,意味着观察粒子的属性时,不能不影响这些属性。同样,观察体验的本质时,也不能不影响体验的本质。这让内省听起来毫无希望。虽然这是一个具有挑战性的问题,但有一些非常有效的解决方法,尽管有些方法需要练习。我们大多数人没有公开讨论我们思维过程的本质的习惯,所以下面的一些内容听起来有点奇怪。

But there is still a greater challenge of introspection. How can we observe our own experiences without tainting them, since the act of observation itself is an experience? We face this problem quite often. Try to observe what your fingers are doing as you type at a computer keyboard and you will quickly find yourself typing slowly and making many errors, if you can still type at all. Try to observe yourself enjoying a movie or a game, and the enjoyment can quickly fade away. Some call this “paralysis by analysis,” and others refer to it as the Heisenberg principle. This principle, in reference to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics, implies that the attributes of a particle cannot be observed without affecting those attributes. Similarly, the nature of an experience cannot be observed without affecting the nature of that experience. This makes introspection sound hopeless. While it is a challenging problem, there are ways around it that are quite effective, though some take practice. Most of us are not in the habit of openly discussing the nature of our thought processes, so some of the following is going to sound a little strange.

分析记忆

Analyze Memories

体验的一个好处是,我们会记住它们。在体验发生时分析体验可能很难,因为大脑中用于分析的部分通常集中在体验本身上。分析体验的记忆要容易得多。记忆并不完美,但分析记忆总比什么都不做要好。当然,记得越多越好,所以最好是利用强烈体验的记忆(这些记忆通常会带来最好的灵感)或新鲜记忆。如果你有精神纪律,那么参与体验(例如玩游戏)也会非常有用,在玩游戏时不要分析它,而是在玩游戏后立即分析记忆。只要有这个意图,就可以帮助你记住体验的更多细节,而不会干扰体验本身。这确实需要你记住你将要分析它,但不要让这种想法干扰体验。很棘手!

One good thing about experiences is that we remember them. Analyzing an experience while it is happening can be hard, because the part of your mind used for analysis is normally focused on the experience itself. Analyzing your memory of an experience is much easier. Memory is imperfect, but analyzing a memory is better than nothing. Of course, the more you remember, the better, so working either with memories of powerful experiences (these often make the best inspiration, anyway) or with fresh memories is best. If you have the mental discipline, it also can be very useful to engage in an experience (such as playing a game), with the intention of not analyzing it while you play, but with the intention of analyzing the memory of it immediately after. Just having this intention can help you remember more details of the experience without interfering with the experience itself. This does require you to remember that you are going to analyze it without letting that thought interfere with the experience. Tricky!

两遍

Two Passes

一种基于分析记忆的方法是回顾你的经历两次。第一次,不要停下来分析任何东西——只是回顾经历。然后,再回顾一次,这一次,分析一切——甚至可能停下来做笔记。你脑海中浮现的是未受污染的经历,第二次回顾让你“重温它”,但让你有机会停下来思考,考虑一下当时的感觉和原因。

A method that builds on analyzing memories is to run through your experience twice. The first time, don’t stop to analyze anything—just have the experience. Then, go back and do it again, this time, analyzing everything—maybe even pausing to take notes. You have the untainted experience fresh in your mind, and the second run-through lets you “relive it” but gives you a chance to stop and think, considering how it felt and why.

偷看

Sneak Glances

观察你的体验而不破坏它的可能性是存在的吗?是的,但需要一些练习。听起来很奇怪,但如果你在体验发生时“偷偷快速瞥一眼”,你通常可以很好地观察它而不会严重降低或打断它。这有点像在公共场所试图仔细观察一个陌生人。短暂地瞥他们几眼,他们不会注意到你在观察他们。但看得太久,你就会引起他们的注意,他们会注意到你在盯着看。幸运的是,你可以通过几次短暂的“精神瞥”了解很多关于体验的信息。同样,这需要一些精神训练,否则你会沉迷于分析。如果你能把这些精神瞥养成习惯,只是一直这样做而不去想它,它们对事情的干扰就会更少。大多数人发现真正打断他们思路或体验的是内心的心理对话。当你开始在脑子里问和回答太多问题时,你的体验注定会失败。 “快速浏览”更像是“够刺激了吗?是的。”然后,你立即停止分析并回到体验中,直到下一次浏览。

Is it possible to observe your experience without spoiling it? It is, but it takes some practice. It sounds strange to say this, but if you “sneak quick glances” at your experience while it is happening, you can often observe it quite well without degrading or interrupting it significantly. It is kind of like trying to get a good look at a stranger in a public place. Take a few short glances at them, and they won’t notice you are observing them. But look too long, and you will catch their attention, and they will notice you staring. Fortunately, you can learn a lot about an experience with a few short “mental glances.” Again, this takes some mental discipline or you will get carried away with analysis. If you can make these mental glances habitual, just doing them all the time without thinking about it, they will interrupt things even less. Most people find what really interrupts their train of thought, or train of experience, is interior mental dialog. When you start asking and answering too many questions in your head, your experience is doomed. A “quick glance” is more like “Exciting enough? Yes.” Then, you immediately stop analyzing and get back to the experience, until the next glance.

默默观察

Observe Silently

不过,理想情况下,你应该观察正在发生的事情,而不是只是快速地看几眼,而是要持续观察。你希望这就像你坐在外面观察自己,只不过你看到的比普通观察者更多。你可以听到你所有的想法,感受到你所有的感受。当你进入这种状态时,你几乎就像有两个头脑:一个在移动,参与体验,一个静止,默默地观察另一个。这听起来可能很奇怪,但它是完全可能的,而且非常有用。这是一个很难达到的状态,但可以达到。它似乎有点像禅宗的自我观察,与试图观察自己呼吸周期的冥想练习没有什么不同。通常我们呼吸时不加思考,但在任何时候,我们都可能有意识地控制我们的呼吸过程——从而干扰它。然而,通过练习,你可以观察你自然、无意识的呼吸而不打扰它。但这需要练习,就像观察你的经历需要练习一样。观察自己的体验可以在任何地方进行——看电视时、工作时、玩耍时,或者做任何事情时。一开始你不会做得很好,但如果你不断尝试和练习,你就会开始掌握它。这需要大量的练习。但如果你真的想倾听自己,了解人类体验的本质,你会发现这种练习是值得的。

Ideally, though, you want to observe what is happening to you while it is happening, not just through a few quick glances but through continuous observation. You want it to be as if you were sitting outside yourself, watching yourself, except that you see more than a normal observer. You can hear all of your thoughts and feel all of your feelings. When you enter this state, it is almost as if you have two minds: one moving, engaged in an experience, and one still, silently observing the other. This may sound completely bizarre, but it is quite possible and quite useful. It is a difficult state to achieve, but it can be reached. It seems to be something like the Zen practice of self-observation, and it is not unlike the meditation exercise of trying to observe your own breathing cycle. Normally we breathe without thinking, but at any moment, we may consciously take control of our breathing process—consequently interfering with it. With practice however, you can observe your natural, unconscious breathing without disturbing it. But this takes practice, just as observing your experiences takes practice. Observing your experiences can be practiced anywhere—while watching TV, while working, while playing, or while doing anything at all. You won’t get it right at first, but if you keep experimenting and practicing, you will start to get the hang of it. It will take a great deal of practice. But if you truly want to listen to your self and understand the nature of human experience, you will find the practice worthwhile.

重要经验

Essential Experience

但是,所有这些关于经验和观察的讨论与游戏有什么关系呢?如果我想制作一款关于打雪仗的游戏,分析我对真实打雪仗的记忆会对我想要制作的打雪仗游戏产生什么影响吗?如果没有真实的雪和现实世界中真实的朋友,我不可能完美地复制真实打雪仗的体验——那么意义何在呢?

But how does all this talk about experience and observations really fit in with games? If I want to make a game about, say, a snowball fight, does analyzing my memories of a real snowball fight have any bearing on the snowball fight game I want to make? There is no way I can perfectly replicate the experience of a real snowball fight without real snow and real friends outside in the real world—so what is the point?

关键在于,你不需要完美复制真实体验来制作一款好游戏。你需要做的是为你的游戏捕捉这些体验的精髓。“体验的精髓”到底是什么意思?每一次难忘的体验都有一些关键特征来定义它并使其变得特别。例如,当你回忆一场打雪仗的经历时,你可能会想到很多事情。有些你甚至可能认为对那次经历至关重要:“雪太大了,学校停课了。”“我们在街上玩。”“雪正好适合打包。”“天气很冷,但阳光明媚——天空很蓝。”“到处都是孩子。”“我们建造了一个巨大的堡垒。”“弗雷德把雪球扔得很高——当我抬头看的时候,他把一个雪球扔到了我的头上!”“我们笑个不停。”还有一些你认为不重要的体验部分:“我穿着灯芯绒裤子。”“我口袋里有一些薄荷糖。”“一个遛狗的男人看着我们。”

The point is that you don’t need to perfectly replicate real experiences to make a good game. What you need to do is to capture the essence of those experiences for your game. What does “the essence of an experience” really mean? Every memorable experience has some key features that define it and make it special. When you go over your memory of a snowball fight experience, for example, you might think of a lot of things. There are some you might even consider essential to that experience: “There was so much snow, school was canceled.” “We played right in the street.” “The snow was just right for packing.” “It was so cold, but sunny—the sky was so blue.” “There were kids everywhere.” “We built this huge fort.” “Fred threw a snowball really high—when I looked up at it, he chucked one right at my head!” “We couldn’t stop laughing.” There are also parts of that experience that you don’t consider essential: “I was wearing corduroy pants.” “I had some mints in my pocket.” “A man walking his dog looked at us.”

作为一名试图设计体验的游戏设计师,你的目标是找出真正定义你想要创造的体验的基本元素,并找到让它们成为游戏设计一部分的方法。这样,你的游戏玩家就可以体验到这些基本元素。本书的大部分内容将介绍制作游戏以传达你希望玩家拥有的体验的多种方式。这里的关键思想是,基本体验通常可以以与真实体验截然不同的形式呈现。为了继续打雪仗的例子,你可以通过哪些方式通过打雪仗游戏传达“天气太冷了”的体验?如果是电子游戏,你当然可以使用艺术作品:角色可以呼出一小团冷凝水,他们可以有颤抖的动画。你可以使用音效——也许呼啸的风可以传达寒冷。也许你想象的那天并没有冷风,但音效可能会捕捉到本质,并给玩家带来一种寒冷的体验。如果你真的非常重视寒冷,你也可以使用游戏规则。也许玩家不戴手套也能更好地打雪仗,但当他们的手太冷时,他们就必须戴上手套。同样,这可能不会真的发生,但游戏规则有助于传递寒冷的体验,而这将成为你游戏中不可或缺的一部分。

As a game designer trying to design an experience, your goal is to figure out the essential elements that really define the experience you want to create and find ways to make them part of your game design. This way, the players of your game get to experience those essential elements. Much of this book will be about the many ways you can craft a game to get across the experience you want players to have. The key idea here is that the essential experience can often be delivered in a form that is very different from a real experience. To follow up on the snowball fight example, what are some of the ways you could convey the experience “it was so cold” through a snowball fight game? If it is a videogame, you could certainly use artwork: the characters could breathe little puffs of condensation, and they could have a shivering animation. You could use sound effects—perhaps a whistling wind could convey coldness. Maybe there wasn’t a cold wind on the day you are imagining, but the sound effect might capture the essence and deliver an experience that seems cold to the player. You could use the rules of the game, too, if cold was really important to you. Maybe players can make better snowballs without gloves, but when their hands get too cold, they have to put gloves on. Again, that might not have really happened, but that game rule helps deliver an experience of coldness that will be an integral part of your game.

有些人觉得这种方法很奇怪——他们说,“只要设计一款游戏,看看它能带来什么体验就行了!”我想这是真的——如果你不知道自己想要什么,你可能不在乎自己能得到什么。但是如果你知道自己想要什么——如果你对玩家体验游戏的方式有一个愿景——你就需要考虑如何提供必要的体验。这就引出了我们的下一个视角。

Some people find this approach strange—they say, “Just design a game and see what experience comes out of it!” And I suppose it is true—if you don’t know what you want, you might not care what you get. But if you do know what you want—if you have a vision of how you would like your game to feel to the players—you need to consider how you are going to deliver the essential experience. And this brings us to our next lens.

如果您想要创造的体验与您实际创造的体验之间存在很大差异,那么您的游戏就需要改变:您需要清楚地说明您想要的基本体验,并找到尽可能多的方法将这种精髓灌输到您的游戏中。

If there is a big difference between the experience you want to create and the one you are actually creating, your game needs to change: you need to clearly state the essential experience you desire and find as many ways as possible to instill this essence into your game.

Wii Sports 中非常成功的棒球游戏的设计是使用“基本体验镜头”的绝佳示例。最初,设计师打算让它尽可能地像真实的棒球一样,并增加额外的好处,让你可以像挥动球棒一样挥动控制器。然而,随着他们的进展,他们意识到他们没有时间尽可能多地模拟棒球的各个方面。因此,他们做出了一个重大决定——由于挥动控制器是这款游戏中最独特的部分,他们将把所有的注意力集中在做好棒球体验的这一部分——他们认为这是基本部分。他们认为其他细节(九局、盗垒等)不是他们试图创造的基本体验的一部分。

The design of the very successful baseball game in Wii Sports is an excellent example of the Lens of Essential Experience in use. Originally, the designers had intended to make it as much like real baseball as possible with the added bonus that you could swing your controller like a bat. As they proceeded, though, they realized they wouldn’t have time to simulate every aspect of baseball as much as they wanted. So they made a big decision—since swinging the controller was the most unique part of this game, they would focus all their attention on getting that part of the baseball experience right—what they felt was the essential part. They decided that other details (nine innings, stealing bases, etc.) were not part of the essential experience they were trying to create.

设计师克里斯·克鲁格在创作桌面角色扮演游戏《007詹姆斯·邦德》时,巧妙运用了本质体验视角。克鲁格之前创作特工角色扮演游戏的尝试,比如 TSR 的《绝密》,曾令他感到沮丧,因为这些游戏太像战争游戏,缺乏间谍电影的精彩本质。对于邦德游戏,克鲁格尽其所能地设计了游戏机制,让玩家感觉像激动人心的007电影。一个突出的例子是“英雄点数”的创造。在传统角色扮演游戏中,当玩家采取危险行动时,比如从窗户跳出飞行中的直升机,游戏管理员会计算成功的可能性,玩家掷骰子,就这样。这给游戏管理员带来了一个平衡难题:如果危险行动的成功概率太低,玩家就不会冒险。但如果几率太高,玩家们就会像超级英雄一样,尝试并成功完成各种不可能的壮举。Klug 的解决方案是给玩家一定数量的英雄点数,他们可以在危险的情况下使用这些点数来改变掷骰子的结果,使之对自己有利。由于每个玩家在每次冒险中只能获得少量点数,因此玩家必须非常小心何时使用它们——但当他们确实使用它们时,是为了上演真正体现詹姆斯邦德书籍和电影精髓的精彩事件。

Designer Chris Klug made masterful use of the Lens of Essential Experience when he created the tabletop role-playing game James Bond 007. Klug had been frustrated with previous attempts to create secret agent role-playing games, such as TSR’s Top Secret, because they played too much like war games—the essence of what made spy movies exciting just wasn’t there. For the Bond game, Klug designed the mechanics to feel like the exciting James Bond films every way he could. One outstanding example was the creation of something called “Hero Points.” In traditional RPGs, when players would undertake a risky action, say, jumping out a window onto a moving helicopter, the game master would make some calculation of the probability of it succeeding, the player would roll the dice, and that was that. This gives the game master a difficult problem of balance: if the probability of succeeding at dangerous actions is too low, the players won’t risk it. But if the chance is too high, the players will all act like superheroes, attempting and succeeding at all kinds of impossible feats. Klug’s solution was to give players a budget of Hero Points, which they could use in risky situations to alter dice rolls to their favor. Since each player only got a small number of points to use on each adventure, players had to be very careful about when to use them—but when they did use them, it was to enact spectacular events that truly captured the essence of the James Bond books and films.

确实,许多设计师并不使用基本体验视角。他们只是遵循自己的直觉,偶然发现一些恰好能让人们享受体验的游戏结构。这种方法的危险之处在于它在很大程度上依赖于运气。能够将体验与游戏分开非常有用:如果你清楚地了解玩家的体验以及游戏中的哪些部分可以实现这种体验,那么你将更清楚地了解如何让你的游戏变得更好,因为你会知道哪些游戏元素可以安全地更改,哪些元素不能更改。游戏设计师的最终目标是提供体验。当你清楚地了解你的理想体验及其基本元素时,你的设计就有了追求的目标。没有这个目标,你只是在黑暗中徘徊。

It is true that many designers do not use the Lens of Essential Experience. They just kind of follow their gut instinct and stumble across game structures that happen to enable experiences that people enjoy. The danger with this approach is that it relies on luck to a large extent. To be able to separate the experience from the game is very useful: if you have a clear picture in your mind of the experiences your players are having and what parts of your game enable that experience, you will have a much clearer picture of how to make your game better, because you will know which elements of the game you can safely change and which ones you cannot. The ultimate goal of the game designer is to deliver an experience. When you have a clear picture of your ideal experience and its essential elements, your design has something to aspire to. Without that goal, you are just wandering in the dark.

你所感受的才是真实的

All That’s Real Is What You Feel

所有这些关于体验的讨论都引出了一个非常奇怪的想法。我们唯一能知道的现实就是体验的现实。我们知道我们所体验的“并不是真正的现实”。我们通过感官和思维过滤现实,我们实际体验到的意识是一种幻觉——根本不是真正的现实。但这种幻觉对我们来说是唯一真实的,因为它就是我们。这对哲学家来说是一件令人头疼的事,但对游戏设计师来说却是一件好事,因为这意味着通过我们的游戏创造的设计体验有机会感觉像我们的日常体验一样真实和有意义(有时甚至更有意义)。

All this talk of experience brings out an idea that is very strange indeed. The only reality that we can know is the reality of the experience. And we know that what we experience is “not really reality.” We filter reality through our senses and through our minds, and the consciousness we actually experience is a kind of illusion—not really reality at all. But this illusion is all that can ever be real for us, because it is us. This is a headache for philosophers, but a wonderful thing for game designers, because it means that the designed experiences that are created through our games have a chance of feeling as real and as meaningful (and sometimes more so) than our everyday experiences.

我们将在第 10 章玩家的思维中进一步探讨这个问题,但现在我们应该花点时间考虑一下这些体验实际上发生在哪里。

We will explore that further in Chapter 10: The Player’s Mind, but right now we should take a moment to consider where these experiences actually take place.

第三

CHAPTER THREE

体验发生在一个场地

The Experience Takes Place in a Venue



3.1

FIGURE

3.1

平台的变迁

The Shifting Sands of Platform

在数字游戏领域,关于平台的讨论非常多。玩家和设计师经常争论 PC、游戏机、手机、平板电脑、网页、手持设备、街机等等。哪个最好?哪个最赚钱?哪个最有趣?哪个最有可能在三年内继续存在?人类天性认为,当某件事成功时,它会永远保持这种状态。但事实并非如此。有些东西会留存,有些会消失。电视在很大程度上取代了广播,但它并没有取代电影。街机游戏被 PC 游戏取代,而 PC 游戏又被游戏机游戏取代,但后来 PC 游戏又回来了,手机和平板电脑游戏也兴起了。这是随机的吗?绝对不是。让特定技术在我们生活中来来去去的东西和人类一样古老和持久。我们一再犯的错误是过于关注现有技术(尽管这些技术新颖而耀眼,但却转瞬即逝),而忘记关注那些熟悉得几乎看不见的东西:我们在生活中使用这些技术的场所。我喜欢把它们称为“场所”。

A tremendous amount of discussion takes place in the digital game realm about platforms. Players and designers are constantly debating about PC vs. console vs. mobile vs. tablet vs. web vs. handheld vs. arcade vs. etcetera vs. etcetera. Which is the best? The most profitable? The most fun? The most likely to still be here in three years? It is human nature to assume that when something is successful, it will remain that way forever. But it isn’t the case. Some things stay, and some go. Television mostly replaced radio, but it didn’t replace movies. Arcade gaming was replaced by PC gaming, which was replaced by console gaming, but then PC gaming came back, and mobile and tablet gaming rose up. Is it random? Absolutely not. The thing that makes specific technologies come and go from our lives is as old and persistent as humanity itself. The mistake that we make again and again is to focus too much on the existing technologies (which, though new and shiny, are ephemeral) and to forget to focus on something so familiar as to be invisible: the places in our lives that we use those technologies. I like to call these venues.

我们需要一点思维上的转变,才能超越我们使用的技术,转而看到我们使用它们的模式,但这是一个很好的练习,因为它有助于我们了解游戏玩法的过去、现在和未来。我将在这里与大家分享我用来思考游戏玩法的场地系统。这不是一个完美的系统——它既有差距,也有重叠——但我一次又一次地发现,在思考哪种游戏玩法在何处最有效以及为什么最有效时,它很有用。

It takes a bit of a mental shift to look past the technologies we use and instead to see the patterns of how we use them, but it is a good exercise, as it helps to give us insight about the past, present, and future of gameplay. I’ll share with you here the system of venues that I use to think about gameplay. It’s not a perfect system—it has both gaps and overlaps—but again and again I have found it useful when thinking about what kind of gameplay works best where and why.



3.2

FIGURE

3.2

私人场地

Private Venues

玩游戏时,隐私往往是一大优势。为了冒险沉浸在幻想世界中,我们喜欢待在一个安全的地方,要么独自一人,要么被我们熟悉和信任的人包围。当然,一些最重要的游戏空间是在家里。

Gameplay is often aided by privacy. To take the risk of immersing yourself in a fantasy world, we like to be in a safe place, either alone or surrounded by people we know and trust. Naturally, some of the most important play spaces are in the home.

壁炉

The Hearth

人类物种的决定性因素之一是我们与火的关系。在我们了解如何使用火之前,我们的生活更像动物。一旦我们掌握并驯服了火,它就改变了我们的文化、心理和身体。它给我们带来了光明、温暖和安全。它让我们可以烹饪食物,让我们拥有更简单的消化系统和更大的大脑。照看火是一项全天候的责任,这使得家庭和大型社会群体比以往任何时候都更加重要。今天,明火已经过时了,但家里仍然有壁炉,因为没有壁炉“感觉不对劲”。一些人类学家推测,我们在凝视火焰时陷入的恍惚状态可能是一种进化行为——如果你的大脑发现连续几个小时凝视火焰会让你的思想平静和安宁,那么你就比那些分心并让火熄灭的人拥有巨大的生存优势。

One of the defining aspects of the human species is our relationship with fire. Before we understood how to use fire, we lived much more like animals. Once we mastered and tamed fire, it changed us culturally, psychologically, and physically. It gave us light, warmth, and safety. It let us cook our food, allowing a simpler digestive system and larger brains. Tending a fire was an around-the-clock responsibility, making families and large social groups more important than ever. Today, open fires are obsolete, but homes are still built with fireplaces, because it just “feels wrong” not to have one. Some anthropologists have theorized that the trance we fall into when staring at a fire may be an evolved behavior—if your mind finds it peaceful and tranquil to stare at a fire for hours on end, you have a tremendous survival advantage over someone else who gets distracted and lets it go out.

在大多数现代家庭中,电视屏幕已经取代了壁炉。而且它是一个很好的替代品。它尺寸合适,在黑暗中发光,闪烁的方式也类似,而且现代壁炉不再依赖家庭成员通过讲故事来娱乐彼此,而是会讲述自己的故事。

In most modern homes, the TV screen has replaced the fireplace. And it makes a pretty good substitute. It’s the right size, it gives light in the darkness, it flickers in a similar way, and instead of relying on family members to entertain each other by telling stories, this modern fire tells its own stories.

毫不奇怪,炉边也是玩游戏的好地方。它似乎最适合那些可以让多人一起玩或观看的游戏。任天堂的 Wii 被证明是一款出色的炉边游戏系统,它拥有一系列游戏,不仅可以全家人玩,而且由于在虚拟世界中进行了所有身体参与,观看起来也相当有趣。从炉边的角度来看,任天堂的后续系统 Wii U 在很大程度上令人失望,这并不奇怪,因为它专注于一个无法离开炉边的单独手持屏幕,只有一个玩家可以看到和享受。同样,流行的关于唱歌和跳舞的游戏,如SingStarDance Central,也很适合炉边,因为我们围着火唱歌跳舞已经有一百多万年了。

Not surprisingly, the hearth is also a good place for gameplaying. It seems to work best for games that can entertain multiple people, either by letting them play together or by being fun to watch. Nintendo’s Wii proved an excellent game system for hearth play, with a collection of games that not only could the whole family play but were also quite entertaining just to watch because of all the physical involvement in a virtual world. From the hearth point of view, it is hardly surprising that Nintendo’s follow-up system, the Wii U, was largely a disappointment, with a focus on a separate handheld screen unable to leave the hearth that only one player could see and enjoy. Similarly, popular games about singing and dancing, such as SingStar and Dance Central, are natural fits for the hearth, as we’ve been singing and dancing around the fire for over a million years.

当新技术出现时,人们很快就提出要终结家庭壁炉。媒体上经常高呼“电视的终结”或“游戏机的终结”。当然,我们在家中欣赏故事、歌曲和玩游戏的方式将继续改变和发展,但自人类诞生以来,家庭壁炉就一直伴随着我们——不要指望它会很快消失。

When new technologies arrive, people are quick to suggest an end to the hearth. “The end of television” or “the end of game consoles” is often shouted in the press. And surely, yes, the way we enjoy stories, songs, and gameplay in the heart of our home will continue to change and evolve, but the hearth has been with us since the dawn of humanity—don’t expect it to vanish anytime soon.

工作台

The Workbench

大多数家庭都有一些专门用于解决难题的私人空间。无论是地下室里用于木工和维修项目的实际工作台,还是用于制作和缝补衣服的缝纫机,还是安静角落里用于做作业或写作的书桌,我都把它们统称为“工作台”。这些地方往往很安静,而且往往有点杂乱,因为工作很乱,客人通常不会去这些地方。当电脑进入家庭后,它们很快就找到了“工作台”区域,因为在电脑上工作和娱乐往往是紧张而孤独的。注意“工作台”和“壁炉”游戏之间的差异是很有趣的。尽管《英雄联盟》等 MOBA 游戏和《魔兽世界》等 MMO游戏非常受欢迎,但它们往往留在“工作台”而不是壁炉。Valve 的 Steam 网络的成功很大程度上源于其他游戏网络(例如索尼、微软、任天堂和苹果)主要关注其他场所,而 Steam 则拥有工作台。

Most homes have some kind of private space set aside for working on hard problems. Whether it be an actual workbench in the basement for woodworking and repair projects, a sewing machine for making and fixing clothes, or a desk in a quiet corner for doing homework or writing, I refer to these collectively as “the workbench.” These places tend to be solitary and quiet and often a bit messy, since work is messy and guests to the home don’t usually visit these places. When computers came into the home, they very quickly found their way to “workbench” areas, since both work and play on a computer tend to be intense and solitary. It is interesting to note the differences between “workbench” and “hearth” games. MOBAs like League of Legends and MMOs like World of Warcraft, for all their popularity, have tended to stay at the “workbench” and out of the hearth. The success of Valve’s Steam network stems greatly from the fact that other game networks (e.g., Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Apple) are focused mostly on other venues, leaving Steam to own the workbench.

工作台游戏往往难度大、刺激,可能需要连续玩几个小时。这类游戏通常不需要家庭成员参与,但可能会要求与志同道合的人一起在线玩,因为他们也认为游戏提供的挑战很重要。截至 2019 年,头戴式虚拟现实显示系统更适合在工作台上玩,而不是在壁炉旁玩,因为这种系统更注重刺激和隐私。

Workbench games tend to be difficult and intense and can require hours of play at a time. They tend not to involve family members but may involve online play with others who are like-minded about the importance of the challenges the games provide. As of 2019, it seems that head-mounted virtual reality display systems, which favor intensity and privacy, are more at home at the workbench than at the hearth.

阅读角

The Reading Nook

阅读对人类来说是一种相对较新的消遣,只是在过去几千年才开始流行,但已经扎根深蒂固。独自坐着读一本书,让思绪飘到另一个充满令人兴奋和有趣的人和地方的世界,这真是太神奇了。书籍是便携式的——我们可以在任何地方阅读,但是我们更喜欢在有些地方阅读。大多数人不喜欢在壁炉边阅读,除非他们独自在家,因为那里往往很吵,而且容易被打扰。在工作台上阅读也不是很不错,因为虽然那里私密而安静,但通常不太舒服。工作台是一个非常“向前倾”的地方,而阅读则更像是一种“向后倾”的活动。典型的阅读角落是卧室或家中任何有远离电视的安静椅子或沙发的房间。

Reading is a relatively new pastime for humans, only coming into popularity in the last few thousand years, but it has taken firm root. There is something magical about sitting alone with a text and letting it carry your mind away to a different world full of exciting and interesting people and places. Books are portable—we can read anywhere, but there are places we very much prefer to read. Most people prefer not to read in the hearth unless they are home alone, as it tends to be noisy and full of interruptions. Reading at the workbench isn’t very preferable either, because though it is private and quiet, it generally isn’t very comfortable. The workbench is a very “lean forward” place, whereas reading is more of a “lean back” activity. Typical reading nooks are in the bedroom or whatever room in the house that has a quiet chair or couch away from the TV.

但是阅读和玩游戏有什么关系呢?这种联系并不明显。PC 游戏和游戏机并不适合在阅读角上玩。当苹果发布 iPad 时,游戏行业并没有留下深刻印象。它不像手机那样方便玩家随时随地玩游戏,也没有控制系统让玩家在炉边和工作台上玩流行的游戏,所以游戏行业基本上不予理睬。但 iPad 确实作为阅读和观看视频的平台而流行起来,并成为游戏领域的一股重要力量。为什么?因为它是阅读角玩游戏的完美平台。在床上、沙发上或某个安静的角落玩平板电脑游戏非常平静和放松,就像读书一样。在平板电脑上成功的游戏与在游戏机或 PC 上成功的游戏截然不同。它们更轻松、更简单、更放松——正是适合阅读角的玩法。

But what does reading have to do with playing games? The connection isn’t obvious. PC gaming and game consoles are not good fits for the reading nook. When Apple announced the iPad, the game industry was not impressed. It didn’t have the convenience of a mobile phone that let you play games anywhere, and it didn’t have a control system that let players play the kinds of experiences so popular at the hearth and the workbench, so the game industry largely dismissed it. But the iPad did catch on as a platform for reading and watching videos, and then became a significant force in gaming. Why? Because it is the perfect platform for gameplay in the reading nook. Playing tablet games in bed, or on a couch, or in some quiet corner is very peaceful and relaxing, much like reading a book. And the games that succeed on tablets are very different than ones that succeed on game consoles or on PC. They are easier, simpler, and more relaxing—the right kind of play to suit the reading nook.

公共场所

Public Venues

当然,并非所有游戏都是在家里进行的。世界是一个令人兴奋的地方,充满了令人兴奋的人、地方和值得游览的东西。基于位置的娱乐 (LBE) 的秘诀已为人所知数千年。无论您经营的是酒馆、剧院、餐厅、妓院、主题公园还是电子游戏厅,规则都是一样的:为他们提供一些他们在家里无法获得的东西。

Not all gameplay happens in the home, of course. The world is an exciting place, full exciting people, places, and things to visit. The secret to location-based entertainment (LBE) has been well known for thousands of years. Whether you are running a tavern, a theater, a restaurant, a brothel, a theme park, or a video arcade, the rule is the same: give them something they can’t get at home.

电影院

The Theater

剧院有一种魔力。剧院有各种形状和大小,用途也各异。无论是戏剧、电影、音乐表演、体育赛事,甚至是天文节目,它们都有一个共同点:大量人群聚集在一起见证某件事。当一群人同时关注一系列事件时,就会发生神奇的事情。不知何故,我们从观众中的其他人那里得到了一些东西。我有时认为我们能够潜意识地感受到其他人对表演的感受,这有助于我们集中自己的感受。这可能就是为什么这么多电视节目都配有笑声的原因——一起欣赏体验让人感到非常满足。

There is something magic about theaters. They come in many shapes and sizes and many purposes. Whether they be for plays, movies, musical performances, sporting events, or even planetarium shows, they have one thing in common: a large number of people gather to witness something together. Something magical happens when a crowd focuses on a sequence of events simultaneously. Somehow, we get something from the other people in the audience. I sometimes think we are able to subconsciously sense how others are feeling about the performance, and it helps focus our own feelings. This is probably why so many TV shows feature laugh tracks—there is something about appreciating an experience together that feels very satisfying.

但正是这群人让在剧院玩游戏成为一大难题。游戏具有互动性,因此希望为每个玩家提供独特的体验。人们一次又一次地尝试创造一种让所有观众都参与其中的剧院体验,但目前还没有取得任何长期的成功。互动的乐趣会随着座位数量的增加而相应减少,要么让体验很快变得令人厌倦,要么让剧院规模太小而无法盈利。也许有人会找到一种方法来利用技术来克服这一困难——但任何解决方案都必须非常巧妙。

But it is this very crowd that makes playing games in the theater such a problem. Games, being interactive, want to be a unique experience for each player. Time and again, people have tried to make theatrical experiences where everyone in the audience participates, but there have not been any long-term successes yet. The joy of interactivity is watered down proportionately by the number of seats, either making for an experience that gets tiresome quickly or for a theater so small as to be unprofitable. It is possible that someone will find a way to use technology to overcome this difficulty—but any solution that does so will have to be very clever indeed.

竞技场

The Arena

数千年来,竞技游戏都是在专门的场地上进行的。从战车比赛到拳击,再到各种团队运动,它们都在竞技场中进行。大多数时候,竞技场都很大,而且在户外,是专门为这类游戏设计的场所。棒球场、高尔夫球场、足球场、网球场、赛马场,甚至法庭——所有这些都是一种竞技场。除了专门用于这种游戏之外,大多数时候,竞技场都在公共场所,让其他人能够目睹那里发生的事情——换句话说,谁赢谁输并不是私人的事情,而是一个公开记录的问题。而且由于人们观看这些比赛会非常兴奋,在许多情况下,竞技场周围会形成一个剧院,将两个场地合二为一!

For thousands of years, competitive games have taken place in specialized fields of play. From chariot racing, to boxing, to team sports of all kinds, they all take place in the arena. Most of the time, the arena is large and out of doors, in a place specially designed for that type of gameplay. Baseball diamonds, golf courses, soccer fields, tennis courts, horse tracks, even a courtroom—all of these are a kind of arena. In addition to being specialized for this kind of gameplay, most of the time, the arena is in a public place, making it possible for others to witness what takes place there—in other words, who wins and who loses is not private, but rather a matter of public record. And since people can get pretty excited about watching these games, in many cases, a theater forms around the arena, creating two venues in one!

到目前为止,数字游戏对传统户外运动领域的影响很小。但这并没有阻止数字游戏呈现出竞技场游戏的特征。多人第一人称射击游戏在很大程度上是一种竞技场游戏:虽然玩家在技术上是在工作台或炉边,但他们的思维却在竞技场中。而且,越来越多的虚拟影院围绕这种游戏而涌现,因为越来越多的人通过 YouTube 或twitch.tv观看彼此玩数字游戏,无论是现场直播(电子竞技锦标赛有时会有数百万玩家同时观看)还是录制。虽然界限肯定正在模糊,但我认为随着时间的推移,随着新的移动和增强现实技术的出现,我们将看到传统体育场馆变得越来越数字化。

So far, digital gameplay has made little impact in the traditional outdoor sports arena. But that hasn’t stopped digital gameplay from taking on the characteristics of arena play. Multiplayer first-person shooters are very much a kind of arena play: though the players are technically in the workbench or the hearth, their minds are in the arena. And, more and more, virtual theaters are springing up around this play, as more and more people are watching each other play digital games, either live (esports tournaments are sometime watched by millions of simultaneous players) or recorded, via YouTube or twitch.tv. While certainly the lines are blurring, I suspect that over time, with new mobile and augmented reality technology, we will see traditional sporting arenas become ever more digital.

博物馆

The Museum

有时我们需要从日常生活中抽身,我们觉得通过考察异国情调的事物和地方,我们将获得急需的多样性,我们将扩大我们对世界的了解,也许最重要的是,我们将带着新的视角回家,为我们周围平凡的事物赋予新的生命。当然,各种博物馆都属于我所说的博物馆类别,但其他很多东西也是如此。动物园和水族馆就是博物馆的一种,当我们去观光时,我们会把参观的城市当作博物馆。即使是去不寻常的商店购物也是一种博物馆之旅,因为我们会看到各种新奇的物品,并想象拥有它们。

Sometimes we need a break from the things in our day-to-day life, and we have a sense that by examining exotic things and places, we will get a dose of much-needed variety, we will expand our knowledge of the world, and perhaps most importantly, we will return home with a new perspective that gives new life to the commonplace things around us. Of course, museums of every sort fall into the category I call the museum, but so do many other things. Zoos and aquariums are sorts of museums, and when we go sightseeing, we treat the city we visit as a sort of museum. Even shopping trips to unusual stores are a sort of museum visit, as we look at, and imagine owning, all sorts of new and exotic objects.

游戏玩法似乎与博物馆格格不入,但许多游戏却与博物馆相得益彰。越来越多的实体博物馆将游戏体验融入其中,向游客介绍他们所观看的内容。参观电子游戏厅具有非常像博物馆的特质,你可以从一个游戏转到另一个游戏,尝试每个游戏,思考自己最喜欢哪个游戏。

Gameplay might seem like an unusual partner for the museum, but many games are right at home there. More and more, actual museums incorporate gameplay experiences as a way to introduce visitors to information about what they are viewing. And visiting a video arcade has a very museum-like quality, as you pass from game to game, trying each and thinking about which ones you like best.

半私人/半公共场所

Half Private/Half Public Venues

其他场所介于家庭的私密性和公共场所的开放性之间,或者它们找到了一种同时存在于两者之中的方法。这些介于公共和私人之间的空间的灵活性使它们变得有趣和重要。

Other venues exist somewhere between the privacy of the home and the openness of a public venue, or they find a way to exist in both. The flexibility of these spaces that live on the boundary between public and private is what makes them interesting and important.

游戏桌

The Gaming Table

在桌子周围玩的游戏非常特别。当玩家像神一样坐在他们控制的玩具世界时,会有一种特殊的面对面的亲密感。当然,我们可以在家里这样做,但我们倾向于在客人来访时这样做,这让我们的家比以前更公开通常情况下是这样。但桌上游戏也存在于更公共的场所,例如酒吧的台球桌或赌场的扑克桌。桌上游戏有一种让玩家特别紧张的东西。奇怪的是,三明治和寿司卷都是在同一时间(十八世纪)发明的,尽管是在世界的不同地方,但发明者都是桌上游戏玩家,他们对游戏如此痴迷,以至于他们需要一种不用停止游戏就能吃东西的方式。

There is something very special about the games that are played around a table. There is a special face-to-face intimacy as the players sit like gods over the toy world they control. Certainly, we can do this in the home, but we have a tendency to do it mostly when guests are over, making our home a bit more public than it normally is. But table games also exist in more public places, such as a pool table at a bar or a poker table in a casino. There is something about table games that creates a special intensity in players. Curiously, both the sandwich and the sushi roll were invented at about the same time (the eighteenth century), though in very different parts of the world, by table gameplayers who were so obsessed with their games that they needed a way to eat without having to stop the game.

棋盘游戏、纸牌游戏和骰子游戏长期以来一直是赌桌游戏的主流。到目前为止,除了一些实验性的棋盘游戏外,数字游戏在这个场所并没有找到多少立足之地,可能是因为它们依赖于垂直屏幕。随着触摸屏越来越便宜、越来越大,以及增强现实眼镜进入市场,一个全新的数字游戏世界完全有可能进入赌桌游戏场所。

Board, card, and dice games have long been the mainstay of the gaming table. So far, excepting some experimental board games, digital games have not found much of a home at this venue, probably because of their reliance on vertical screens. As touch screens grow cheaper and larger, and augmented reality glasses enter the marketplace, it is entirely possible that a whole new world of digital games will come into the table games venue.

操场

The Playground

作为对游戏充满热情的成年人,我们有时会忘记游戏主要是孩子们的天下。虽然孩子们喜欢在家里以不同的方式玩耍,有时他们喜欢在竞技场般的场地进行正式的运动,但他们也喜欢和朋友一起在户外玩耍。当我们听到“游乐场”这个词时,我们首先想到的往往是公园里的游乐设施。虽然那是游乐场的一种,但任何孩子们聚集在一起即兴玩耍的空间,无论是后院、街道、空地还是树林里的洞穴,都是一种游乐场。

As adults who are excited about games, we can sometimes forget that play is largely the domain of children. And while children like to play in different ways in the home and they sometimes enjoy the formality of playing sports in arena-like venues, they also like to play out-of-doors with their friends. When we hear the world “playground” our first thought is often of play equipment at public parks. And while that is one sort of playground, any space where children gather for improvisational play, be it a backyard, a street, a vacant lot, or a cave in the woods, is a kind of playground.

成年人很容易忘记操场游戏,因为我们大多不再那样玩了。但孩子们却永远会忘记,而且他们必须忘记——这是他们成长过程中的一个重要部分。到目前为止,视频游戏行业基本上忽视了操场游戏,因为他们无法在操场上制作游戏——但随着技术变得更加坚固和更具移动性,这种情况可能会改变。

Playground play is easy for adults to forget about, because we mostly don’t play that way anymore. But children always will, and they must—it is an important part of their development. The video game industry has largely ignored playground play so far, because it hasn’t been feasible for them to create games that work there—but as technology becomes more rugged and more mobile, that will likely change.

任何地方

Anywhere

有些游戏并不关心在哪里玩。填字游戏、数独和单词查找游戏是“随时随地玩”游戏的经典纸质示例,它们在公交车上或在工作或学校有几分钟空闲时间时非常有用。当然,智能手机游戏的爆炸式增长永远改变了随时随地玩的场所,创造了一套极其丰富的游戏,可以在任何时间、任何地点玩。然而,值得注意的是,由于这些游戏的可中断性和小屏幕尺寸,它们具有一些独特的品质。它们往往可以一小段一小段地玩,而且它们的界面和故事往往非常简单。此外,因为它们只是在一天中零零星星地消磨几分钟时间,玩家通常不愿意预先为它们支付太多费用,如果可能的话,他们更愿意免费。在第 32 章利润中,我们将更多地讨论这些游戏的具体内容及其商业模式的独特之处。

Some games don’t really care where they are played. Crossword puzzles, Sudoku, and Word Find games are classic paper examples of “play anywhere” games, which can be very useful on the bus or when you have a few spare minutes at work or school. Of course, the explosion of smartphone games has changed the anywhere venue forever, creating a vastly richer set of games that can be played anywhere, at any time. However, it is worth noting that these games, due to their interruptibility and small screen size, have some distinct qualities. They tend to be playable in tiny bites, and they tend to have very simple interfaces and stories. Additionally, because they are just filling a few minutes here and there during one’s day, players are generally not willing to pay very much for them up front, preferring them to be free if possible. In Chapter 32: Profit, we’ll talk more about the specifics of these games and the peculiarities of their business models.

混合和搭配场地

Venues Mixed and Matched

在这个场所系统中,很容易发现差距和重叠。当我在餐厅玩弹球游戏时,我在哪个场所?保龄球馆是哪个场所?赌场是博物馆、竞技场、桌上游戏集合,还是完全不同的东西?任天堂 Switch 是一个了不起的平台,因为它在炉边、阅读角、游戏桌甚至任何地方都能很好地运行。重要的不是要有完美的场所分类;重要的是要看透游戏和平台,这样你才能了解场所及其属性,因为虽然游戏和技术不断变化,但场所变化很小。为此,这里有一个镜头可以帮助你看清真相。

It’s easy to find gaps and overlaps in this system of venues. What venue am I in when I play a game of pinball at a restaurant? What venue is a bowling alley? Is a casino a museum, an arena, a collection of table games, or something else entirely? The Nintendo Switch is a remarkable platform because it works well in the Hearth, the Reading Nook, the Gaming Table, and even Anywhere. The important thing isn’t to have a perfect taxonomy of venues; the important thing is to see past the games and platforms so that you are aware of the venues and their properties, because while games and technologies change constantly, venues change very little. To that end, here is a lens to help you see the truth.

既然我们已经讨论了体验及其发生地点,我们需要面对一个更令人困扰的问题。究竟是什么让游戏成为游戏?

Now that we’ve talked about experiences and where they take place, we need to confront a more troubling question. What exactly makes a game a game?

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 克里斯托弗·亚历山大等人著的《模式语言》 。这是一本关于人类与其所居住空间之间关系的令人难以置信的引人深思的书。我们将在第 21 章“空间”中。

  • A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. This is an incredibly thought-provoking book about the relationship between humans and the spaces they live in. We’ll see this book again in Chapter 21: Spaces.

第四

CHAPTER FOUR

游戏带来的体验

The Experience Rises Out of a Game



4.1

FIGURE

4.1

谈论体验设计是一件很棒的事情。创造出色的体验确实是我们的目标。但我们无法触及体验。我们无法直接操纵它们。游戏设计师可以控制、可以参与其中的是游戏。游戏是你的粘土,你可以塑造它,塑造它,创造各种精彩的游戏体验。

It is wonderful to talk about the design of experiences. Creating great experiences is indeed our goal. But we cannot touch experiences. We cannot manipulate them directly. What a game designer can control, can get their hands in, is the game. The game is your clay, and you will shape it and mold it to create all kinds of fabulous game experiences.

那么,我们谈论的是哪种游戏呢?在本书中,我们指的是所有类型的游戏:棋盘游戏、纸牌游戏、运动游戏、游乐场游戏、聚会游戏、赌博游戏、益智游戏、街机游戏、电子游戏、电脑游戏、视频游戏,以及您可能想到的任何其他游戏,因为我们将会看到,相同的设计原则适用于所有这些游戏。令人惊讶的是,尽管这些游戏种类繁多,但我们却将它们全部视为一类;也就是说,尽管它们各不相同,但我们直观地将它们全部视为游戏。

So, what kind of games are we talking about? In this book, we mean all kinds of games: board games, card games, athletic games, playground games, party games, gambling games, puzzle games, arcade games, electronic games, computer games, videogames, and just about any other game that you might think of, for, as we’ll see, the same principles of design apply to all of them. It is a little surprising that with such variety between these kinds of games, we recognize them all as one kind; that is, as different as they are, we intuitively recognize them all as games.

这些事物的共同点是什么?或者,我们该如何定义“游戏”?

What is it that these things have in common? Or, to put it another way, how do we define “game”?

关于定义的咆哮

A Rant about Definitions

在继续之前,我想先明确一下我们为什么要寻求这样的定义。是不是为了让我们知道“游戏”是什么意思?不。在大多数情况下,我们都知道“游戏”是什么意思。诚然,“游戏”(或任何术语)的含义因人而异,但大多数情况下,我们都知道游戏是什么。有时,在讨论中,可能会出现关于某件事是否“真正是游戏”的争论,迫使讨论参与者澄清他们自己对游戏的定义,一旦解决了这个问题,讨论就会继续进行。人们对游戏的正确定义以及什么是或不是真正的游戏有自己的个人观点并没有错,就像他们对什么是或不是“音乐”、“艺术”或“运动”可能有类似的看法一样。

Before we continue, I want to be clear about why we should seek such a definition. Is it so that we know what we mean when we say “game”? No. For the most part, we all know what we are talking about when we say “game.” It is true that the idea of what “game” (or any term) means will vary a bit from person to person, but mostly, we all know what a game is. Sometimes, in a discussion, a debate may arise about whether something is “truly a game,” forcing the discussion participants to clarify their own personal definition of what a game is, and once that is settled, the discussion moves on. There is nothing wrong with people having their own personal opinions about the proper definition of a game and what is or is not really a game, just as they may have similar opinions about what really is or not “music,” “art,” or “a sport.”

有些人,主要是学者,并不持这种观点。他们认为游戏设计领域缺乏标准化定义是阻碍这种艺术形式发展的“危机”。通常,最关心这个问题的人与游戏的实际设计和开发相距最远。那么现实世界的设计师和开发者如何在没有标准化词汇的情况下生存呢?就像其他人一样:当出现歧义时,他们只是解释他们的意思。这有时会减慢讨论速度,从而减慢设计过程吗?是也不是。是的,它要求设计师有时必须停下来解释他们的意思,这可能会使事情慢一点(而且只是一点点)。另一方面,这种澄清的停顿从长远来看往往可以节省时间,因为停顿之后,设计师们肯定都清楚对方的意思。

Some people, mostly academics, do not hold this view. They view the lack of standardized definitions in the world of game design as “a crisis” that is holding back the art form. Usually, the people most concerned about this are the farthest removed from the actual design and development of games. So how do real-world designers and developers get by without a standardized vocabulary? Just like everyone else: when there is ambiguity, they simply explain what they mean. Does this sometimes slow down discussions and therefore the design process? Yes and no. Yes, it requires that at times, designers have to stop and explain what they mean, which can slow things down a little (and only a little). On the other hand, this pause for clarification often saves time in the long run, since after the pause, the designers are definitely each clear about what the other means.

如果有一个集中的标准术语词典,供大家在讨论游戏设计问题时参考,那会不会更好?这当然很方便,但远非必要,而且我们没有这样的词典远非“障碍”或“危机”。这只是一个小小的不便,因为它这意味着我们有时必须停下来思考我们的意思和我们想要表达的意思。事实上,从长远来看,这样做可能会让我们成为更好的设计师,而不是更差的设计师,因为我们被迫多思考一点。此外,这样的词典很难成为永远的黄金标准——随着技术的变化,它们迫使我们重新考虑一些旧的定义和术语,重新定义其中一些,并创造新的术语——因此定义和重新定义的过程可能会无限期地持续下去,或者至少只要与游戏相关的技术不断进步,就会持续下去。

Would it be best if there was some centralized dictionary of standard terms we could all refer to when discussing issues of game design? It would certainly be convenient, but it is far from necessary, and the fact that we don’t have such a dictionary is far from a “barrier” or a “crisis.” It is just a slight inconvenience, because it means we sometimes have to stop and think about what we mean and what we are trying to say. In fact, having to do this, in the long run, may make us better designers, not weaker ones, since we are forced to think just a little bit more. Further, such a dictionary would hardly be a gold standard for all time—as technologies change, they force us to reconsider some of our old definitions and terms, redefine some of them, and create new terms—so the process of definition and redefinition is likely to continue indefinitely or at least as long as there are advances in technology that are relevant to games.

另一些人则认为,缺乏游戏设计词汇的“真正问题”不是标准化定义的问题,而是根本缺乏术语来讨论游戏设计过程中出现的一些复杂想法。因此,他们认为我们迫切需要尝试为所有这些事物命名。然而,这是本末倒置,因为我们面临的真正问题不是缺乏描述游戏设计元素的词汇——问题是缺乏对这些想法的真正含义的清晰思考。与许多设计领域一样,游戏设计师遵循自己的直觉和感觉来判断什么是好游戏或坏游戏,有时很难清楚地表达某个设计到底是好是坏——他们只是在看到它时就知道了,所以他们能够设计出伟大的东西。你当然可以通过这种方式解决问题。重要的是清楚地说明你说一个设计是好是坏是什么意思,以及具体如何改进。这不是了解游戏设计词汇的问题,而是了解游戏设计理念的问题,我们怎么称呼它们并不重要。这些事物的标准化术语将随着时间的推移而发展,这不是一个可以仓促完成的过程。设计师认为有用的术语将保留下来,而他们认为没用的术语将被淘汰。

Others say that the “real problem” with a lack of game design vocabulary is not a problem of standardized definitions, but a lack of terms, at all, to discuss some of the complex ideas that arise as part of the game design process. Therefore, they argue it is urgent that we try to put names on all these things. This is putting the cart before the horse, though, for the real problem we have is not a lack of words to describe elements of game design—the problem is a lack of clear thinking about what these ideas really are. As with many fields of design, game designers follow their gut instincts and feelings about what makes a good or a bad game and sometimes have difficulty articulating what exactly it is about a certain design that is good or bad—they just know it when they see it, so they are able to design great things. And you can certainly get by this way. What is important is to state clearly what you mean when you say a design is good or bad and how, specifically, it can improve. It is not a matter of knowing the vocabulary of game design—it is a matter of knowing the ideas of game design—what we call them matters little. Standardized terms for these things will evolve over time—this is not a process that can be rushed. The terms designers find useful will survive, the ones they don’t will fall by the wayside.

尽管如此,书中始终会介绍关于重要游戏设计理念的清晰陈述以及引用这些理念的术语,本书中也介绍了一些术语。这些并非旨在成为规范定义,而是希望您能够使用的清晰的理念表达。如果您有更好的想法或更好的术语,请使用它们 — 如果您的想法和术语确实清晰有力,它们就会流行起来,并帮助其他人更清楚地思考和表达它们的含义。

That said, clear statements about important game design ideas, and terms to refer to them, are introduced all the time, and several are introduced in this book. These are not meant to be canonical definitions, but rather a clear expression of ideas that I hope you can use. If you have better ideas, or better terms, please use them instead—if your ideas and terms are indeed clear and strong, they will catch on and help other people more clearly think and express what they mean.

我们必须面对的一些概念必然是模糊的。“体验”、“玩耍”和“游戏”等术语的定义因人而异,考虑到这些术语所代表的概念在我们思考和讨论了几千年之后仍然没有明确的定义,它们不太可能在短期内得到严格的定义。

Some of the ideas we will have to deal with are necessarily murky. Terms like “experience,” “play,” and “game” are defined differently by different people, and considering that the ideas these terms represent do not have clear definitions even after the thousands of years we’ve been thinking and talking about them, it is unlikely they will be rigidly defined anytime soon.

这是否意味着我们应该回避尝试定义它们?绝不是。定义事物会迫使你清晰、简洁、有分析地思考它们。列出术语及其定义不会给你带来什么帮助。踏上尝试定义这些术语的旅程将教会你很多东西,并增强你思考设计的能力,即使你最终得到的定义可能并不完美。因此,你可能会发现本章提供的问题比答案更多。但没关系:本书的目标是让你成为一个更好的设计师,而一个好的设计师必须思考。

Does this mean we should shy away from trying to define them? By no means. Defining things forces you to think about them clearly, concisely, and analytically. Having a list of terms and their definitions would teach you little. Embarking on the journey of trying to define these terms will teach you a great deal and strengthen your ability to think about design, even though the definitions you end up with may prove imperfect. For this reason, you may find this chapter offers you more questions than it does answers. But that’s okay: the goal of this book is to make you a better designer, and a good designer must think.

那么,什么是游戏?

So What Is a Game?

智慧的开端是对术语的定义。

—苏格拉底

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

—Socrates

既然我们已经讨论了为什么要定义这些东西,让我们尝试一下,从一些我们可以肯定的关于游戏的事情开始。下面是开始:

Now that we have discussed why we should define these things, let’s give it a try, beginning with some things we can say for sure about games. Here’s a start:

游戏就是你玩的东西。

A game is something you play.

我认为没有人会不同意这一点。但这并没有告诉我们太多。例如,游戏和玩具有什么不同?是的。游戏比玩具更复杂,涉及不同类型的玩法。我们甚至使用不同的语言:

I don’t think anyone will disagree with that. But it doesn’t tell us very much. For example, is a game different than a toy? Yes. Games are more complex than toys and involve a different kind of play. We even use different language:

玩具是用来玩的东西

A toy is something you play with.

好的,很有趣。由于玩具比游戏简单,也许我们应该先尝试定义它们。让我们看看我们能否更好地定义玩具。你可以和朋友一起玩,他们不是玩具。玩具是物体。

Okay, interesting. Since toys are simpler than games, maybe we should try defining them first. Let’s see if we can do better with our definition of toy. You can play with friends, and they aren’t toys. Toys are objects.

玩具是你玩耍的物品。

A toy is an object you play with.

嗯,这还算可以。但我可能会一边打电话一边玩一卷胶带。这算是玩具吗?从技术上讲,是的,但可能不是很好的玩具。事实上,任何你玩的东西都可以归类为玩具。也许我们开始考虑什么才是好的玩具是个好主意。“有趣”是与好玩具联系在一起的一个词。事实上,你可能会说:

Well, that’s something. But I might play with a roll of tape while I talk on the phone. Does that make it a toy? Technically, yes, but probably not a very good one. In fact, anything you play with could be classified as a toy. Perhaps it is a good idea for us to start considering what makes for a good toy. “Fun” is one word that comes to mind in conjunction with good toys. In fact, you might say:

好的玩具是可以让人玩得开心的物品。

A good toy is an object that is fun to play with.

不错。但是我们说“有趣”是什么意思呢?我们只是指愉悦,还是享受?愉悦是乐趣的一部分,但乐趣仅仅是愉悦吗?有很多令人愉悦的体验,例如吃三明治或躺在阳光下,但将这些体验称为“有趣”似乎很奇怪。不,有趣的事情有一种特殊的闪光点,一种特殊的兴奋感。一般来说,有趣的事情都伴随着惊喜。所以乐趣的定义可能是:

Not bad. But what do we mean when we say “fun?” Do we simply mean pleasure, or enjoyment? Pleasure is part of fun, but is fun simply pleasure? There are lots of experiences that are pleasurable, for example, eating a sandwich or lying in the sun, but it would seem strange to call those experiences “fun.” No, things that are fun have a special sparkle, a special excitement to them. Generally, fun things involve surprises. So a definition for fun might be:

乐趣就是伴随着惊喜的快乐。

Fun is pleasure with surprises.

这可能吗?真的这么简单吗?很奇怪,你可以用一个词一辈子,并且确切知道它的意思,但当被问到时却无法清楚地表达出来。测试定义的一个好方法是提出反例。你能想到一些有趣但不令人愉快的事情,或者有趣但不涉及一些惊喜感的事情吗?相反,你能想到一些令人愉快且有惊喜但不有趣的事情吗?惊喜和乐趣是每个游戏设计中如此重要的一部分,因此它们成为我们的下两个镜头。

Can that be right? Can it be that simple? It is strange how you can use a word your whole life and know for certain what it means, but not be able to express it clearly when asked. A good way to test definitions is to come up with counterexamples. Can you think of things that are fun, but not pleasurable, or fun, but don’t involve some feeling of surprise? Conversely, can you think of things that are pleasurable and have surprises but aren’t fun? Surprise and fun are such important parts of every game design that they become our next two lenses.

那么,回到玩具。我们说玩具是玩的东西,好玩具是玩起来有趣的东西。但我们所说的“玩”是什么意思呢?这是一个棘手的问题。我们一看到它就知道玩是什么,但很难表达。许多人试图对“玩”的含义做出明确的定义,但大多数人似乎都以这样或那样的方式失败了。让我们考虑一下其中的几个。

So, back to toys. We say that a toy is an object you play with, and a good toy is an object that is fun to play with. But what do we mean by play? This is a tricky one. We all know what play is when we see it, but it is hard to express. Many people have tried for a solid definition of what play means, and most of them seem to have failed in one way or another. Let’s consider a few.

玩耍是漫无目的地消耗旺盛的精力。

—弗里德里希·席勒

Play is the aimless expenditure of exuberant energy.

—Friedrich Schiller

这是过时的“剩余能量”游戏理论的表达,该理论认为游戏的目的是消耗额外的能量。纵观心理学的发展史,人们倾向于将复杂的行为过于简单化,这就是早期的例子。它还使用了“漫无目的”这个词,好像游戏没有目标,而游戏肯定有目标。我们当然可以做得更好。

This is an expression of the outdated “surplus energy” theory of play that the purpose of play is to expend extra energy. Throughout the history of psychology, there has been a tendency to oversimplify complex behaviors, and this is an early example of that. It also uses the word “aimless,” as if play did not have goals, which it most certainly does. Surely we can do better than this.

游戏是指那些伴随着相对愉悦、兴奋、力量和自我主动感的活动。

—J.巴纳德·吉尔摩

Play refers to those activities which are accompanied by a state of comparative pleasure, exhilaration, power, and the feeling of self-initiative.

—J. Barnard Gilmore

这当然涵盖了部分领域。这些当然是经常与玩耍有关的事情。但不知何故,这似乎并不完整。其他事情也与玩耍有关,比如想象力、竞争和解决问题。同时,这个定义太宽泛了。例如,一位高管可能会努力工作以争取一份合同,并在这样做的过程中体验到“相对的快乐、兴奋、力量和自我主动的感觉”,但称其为玩耍行为似乎很奇怪。让我们试试别的。

That certainly covers some of the territory. Those are certainly things that are often associated with play. But it doesn’t seem complete, somehow. Other things are also associated with play, like imagination, competition, and problem solving. At the same time, this definition is too broad. For example, an executive might work hard to land a contract and in doing so experience “comparative pleasure, exhilaration, power, and the feeling of self-initiative,” but it would seem strange to call that an act of play. Let’s try something else.

游戏是在更为严格的结构内的自由运动。

——凯蒂·萨伦和埃里克·齐默尔曼

Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.

—Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman

这个不寻常的定义出自《游戏规则》一书,它试图创建一种非常开放的游戏定义,以便可以包括诸如“墙壁上光线的游戏”和“汽车方向盘的游戏”之类的东西。尽管很难找到这个定义未涵盖的我们称之为游戏的东西,但是我们可以很容易地找到看似非游戏活动的例子。例如,如果一个孩子被迫擦洗厨房地板,那么这个孩子正在享受(享受可能不是一个恰当的词)在更刚性的结构(地板)内自由移动(可以自由滑动刷子),但将这种活动归类为游戏听起来很奇怪。尽管如此,从这个定义的角度思考你的游戏会很有趣。也许不同的定义可以更好地捕捉游戏的精神。

This unusual definition, from the book Rules of Play, is an attempt to create a definition of play so open that it can include things like “the play of the light along the wall” and “the play of a car’s steering wheel.” And while it is hard to find something we would call play that is not covered by this definition, one can easily come up with examples of what seem to be nonplay activities that do fit. For example, if a child is forced to scrub the kitchen floor, the child is enjoying (enjoying may be the wrong word) free movement (can slide the brush around freely) within a more rigid structure (the floor), but it would sound strange to classify this activity as play. Nonetheless, thinking about your game from the point of view of this definition can be interesting. Perhaps a different definition can better capture the spirit of play.

玩耍是自发进行的并且是为了玩耍本身的目的。

—乔治·桑塔亚那

Play is whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake.

—George Santayana

这一点很有趣。首先,让我们考虑一下自发性。游戏通常是自发的。当我们说某人“爱玩”时,这就是我们的意思的一部分。但所有的游戏都是自发的吗?不。例如,有人可能会提前几个月计划一场垒球比赛,但当比赛最终开始时,它仍然是“游戏”。因此,自发性有时是游戏的一部分,但并非总是如此。有些人认为自发性对于游戏的定义非常重要,以至于任何削弱它的企图都会使活动不再是游戏。伯纳德·梅根 (Bernard Mergen) 阐述了他的观点:“游戏、有赢家或输家的竞争性游戏,在我看来不是游戏。”这种观点过于极端,似乎荒谬可笑——按照这种逻辑,游戏(我们通常认为的游戏)不是你可以玩的东西。撇开这个极端不谈,自发性似乎确实是游戏的重要组成部分。

This one is interesting. First, let us consider spontaneity. Play is quite often spontaneous. When we talk about someone being “playful,” that is part of what we mean. But is all play spontaneous? No. Someone might plan a softball game months in advance, for example, but when the game finally happens, it is still “play.” So spontaneity is sometimes part of play, but not always. Some consider spontaneity so important to the definition of play that any attempt to dampen it renders an activity not play. Bernard Mergen states his view: “Games, competitive games, which have a winner or a loser, are not, in my definition, play.” This viewpoint is so extreme as to seem ridiculous—by this logic, games (as we typically think of them) are not something you can play. This extreme aside, spontaneity does seem to be an important part of play.

但是桑塔亚那定义的第二部分“为自身目的而做”又如何呢?他似乎想说“我们玩是因为我们喜欢玩”。这听起来微不足道,但却是游戏的一个重要特征。如果我们不喜欢做某件事,那它可能就不是游戏。也就是说,一项活动本身不能被归类为“工作活动”或“游戏活动”。相反,重要的是一个人对这项活动的态度。正如玛丽·波平斯在谢尔曼兄弟的美妙歌曲《一勺糖》中告诉我们的那样,

But how about the second part of Santayana’s definition: “done for its own sake”? By this, he seems to mean “we play because we like to.” As trivial as it sounds, this is an important characteristic of play. If we don’t like to do it, it probably isn’t play. That is, an activity itself cannot be classified as a “work activity” or “play activity.” Instead, what matters is one’s attitude about the activity. As Mary Poppins tells us in the Sherman brothers’ wonderful song, “A Spoonful of Sugar,”

在每一项必须完成的工作中

其中有一定的趣味性。

您发现了乐趣并快照!

这份工作就像一场游戏。

In ev’ry job that must be done

There is an element of fun.

You find the fun and snap!

The job’s a game.

但是我们如何才能找到乐趣呢?想想心理学家米哈里·契克森米哈赖(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,发音为“Chick sent me high”)讲述的工厂工人里科·麦德林(Rico Medellin)如何将自己的工作变成一场游戏的故事:

But how do we find the fun? Consider the story that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Chick sent me high”) relates about how factory worker Rico Medellin turns his job into a game:

他必须对经过他工作台前的每个单元执行的任务需要 43 秒才能完成——一个工作日内几乎要执行 600 次相同的操作。大多数人很快就会厌倦这样的工作。但 Rico 从事这项工作已经五年多了,他仍然乐在其中。原因是他对待任务的方式与奥运会运动员对待比赛的方式相同:我怎样才能打破自己的纪录?

The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon. But Rico has been at this job for over five years, and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record?

这种态度的转变让 Rico 的工作从工作变成了娱乐。这对他的工作表现有何影响?“五年后,他一天的最佳平均成绩是每单位 28 秒。”他仍然喜欢这样做:“‘这比其他任何事情都好,’Rico 说。‘这比看电视好多了。’”

This shift in attitude turned Rico’s job from work into play. How has it affected his job performance? “After five years, his best average for a day has been twenty-eight seconds per unit.” And he still loves doing it: “‘It’s better than anything else,’ Rico says. ‘It’s a whole lot better than watching TV.’”

这是怎么回事?简单的目标设定如何突然将我们通常归类为工作的活动重新定义为一种明显属于工作性质的活动?游戏的本质是什么?答案似乎是他做这件事的原因发生了变化。他不再是为了别人而做这件事;他现在是为了自己的个人原因而做这件事。桑塔亚纳实际上详细阐述了他的定义,进一步研究后发现,

What is going on here? How does simple goal setting suddenly redefine an activity we would normally classify as work into an activity that is clearly a kind of play? The answer seems to be a change in the reason he is doing the activity. He is no longer doing it for someone else; he is now doing it for his own personal reasons. Santayana actually elaborates on his definition, stating that upon further examination,

工作和娱乐......变得等同于奴役和自由。

Work and play … become equivalent to servitude and freedom.

我们工作,是因为我们有义务这样做。我们为了食物而工作,因为我们是肚子的奴隶。我们为了支付房租而工作,因为我们是安全和舒适的奴隶。有些奴役是自愿的,比如愿意赚钱照顾家人,但无论如何,这都是奴役。我们这样做是因为我们必须这样做,而不是因为“我们喜欢这样做”。你越有义务去做某件事,就越觉得它像工作。你越没有义务去做某件事,就越觉得它像玩耍。换句话说,“所有玩耍都有一个不变的原则……那就是,谁玩就玩得自由。谁必须玩就不能玩。”

When we work, we do it because we are obligated to. We work for food because we are slaves to our bellies. We work to pay the rent because we are slaves to our safety and comfort. Some of this servitude is willing servitude, such as willingness to earn money to care for our families, but it is servitude nonetheless. We are doing it because we have to, not because “we feel like it.” The more obligated you are to do something, the more it feels like work. The less obligated you are to do something, the more it feels like play. Stated differently, “It is an invariable principle of all play … that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play cannot play.”

在此基础上,我想分享一下我自己对游戏的定义,虽然它并不完美,但它有自己有趣的视角。我经常发现,在尝试定义人类活动时,少关注活动本身,多关注激发活动的想法和感受会很有用。我不禁注意到,大多数游戏活动似乎都在试图回答以下问题:

Building off of this, I’d like to share my own definition of play, which, though imperfect like these others, has its own interesting perspective. I often find when trying to define things about human activity, it can be useful to pay less attention to the activity itself and more attention to the thoughts and feelings that motivate the activity. I can’t help but notice that most play activities seem to be attempts to answer questions like the following:

  • “当我转动这个旋钮时会发生什么?”

  • “What happens when I turn this knob?”

  • “我们能击败这支球队吗?”

  • “Can we beat this team?”

  • “我可以用这种粘土做什么呢?”

  • “What can I make with this clay?”

  • “我能跳这根绳子多少次?”

  • “How many times can I jump this rope?”

  • “当我完成这个关卡后会发生什么?”

  • “What happens when I finish this level?”

当你自由地、自愿地、而不是因为有义务地回答问题时,我们会说你很好奇。但好奇心并不意味着你会玩耍。不,玩耍涉及其他东西——玩耍涉及有意识的行为,通常是触摸或改变某物的有意识行为——你可能会说是操纵某物。因此,一个可能的定义是:

When you seek to answer questions freely, of your own volition, and not because you are obligated to, we say you are curious. But curiosity doesn’t immediately imply you are going to play. No, play involves something else—play involves willful action, usually a willful action of touching or changing something—manipulating something, you might say. So one possible definition would be:

游戏是一种满足好奇心的操纵方式。

Play is manipulation that indulges curiosity.

当里科试图打破他的流水线目标时,他试图回答这个问题:“我能打破我的记录吗?”突然间,他这样做的原因不是为了赚钱付房租,而是为了满足他对一个个人问题的好奇心。

When Rico tries to beat his assembly line goal, he is trying to answer the question: “Can I beat my record?” Suddenly, the reason for his activity is not to earn money to pay the rent, but instead to indulge his curiosity about a personal question.

这个定义把一些我们通常不认为是游戏的东西称为游戏,比如艺术家在画布上做实验。另一方面,他可能会说他在“玩颜色”。一个化学家尝试做实验来测试一个心仪的理论——是她在玩吗?她可能会说她在“玩弄一个想法”。这个定义有缺陷(你能找到它们吗?),但我确实认为这是一个有用的视角,就我个人而言,这是我最喜欢的游戏定义。这也将我们引向镜头#6

This definition calls some things play that we might not ordinarily think of as play, such as an artist experimenting on canvas. On the other hand, he might say he is “playing with color.” A chemist who tries an experiment to test a pet theory—is she playing? She might say she is “playing with an idea.” This definition has flaws (can you find them?), but I do find it a useful perspective, and personally, it is my favorite definition of play. It also brings us to Lens #6.

不,说真的,什么是游戏?

No, Seriously, What Is a Game?

我们已经为玩具和乐趣想出了一些定义,甚至在游戏中取得了不错的成绩。让我们再次尝试回答我们最初的问题:我们应该如何定义“游戏”?

We’ve come up with some definitions for toys and fun and even made a good solid run at play. Let’s try again to answer our original question: How should we define “game”?

之前我们说过“游戏就是你玩的东西”,这似乎没错,但范围不够狭窄。与玩一样,许多人试图定义“游戏”。让我们来看看其中的一些。

Earlier we stated that “a game is something you play,” which seems to be true, but isn’t narrow enough. As with play, many people have tried to define “game.” Let’s look at a few of these.

游戏是自愿控制系统的一种运用,其中力量之间在规则的约束下进行竞争,以产生不均衡的结果。

—艾略特·阿维顿和布莱恩·萨顿·史密斯

Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems, in which there is a contest between powers, confined by rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome.

—Elliot Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith

哇哦。太科学了!我们来分析一下吧。

Wow. Very scientific! Let’s pick it apart.

首先是“自愿控制系统的运用”:也就是说,游戏就像玩耍一样,是自愿参与的。

First, “an exercise of voluntary control systems”: that is, like play, games are entered willfully.

第二,“权力的较量”:这似乎是大多数游戏的一部分。两个或多个东西在争夺主导地位。一些单人游戏并不总是有这种感觉(你真的会把俄罗斯方块称为权力的较量吗?),但这句话表达了两点:游戏有目标,游戏有冲突。

Second, “a contest of powers”: that does seem to be part of most games. Two or more things are striving for dominance. Some single-player games don’t always feel this way (would you really call Tetris a contest of powers?), but this phrase gets across two things: games have goals, and games have conflict.

第三,“受规则限制”:很重要的一点!游戏有规则,玩具没有规则。规则绝对是游戏的一大特点。

Third, “confined by rules”: a very important point! Games have rules. Toys do not have rules. Rules are definitely one of the defining aspects of games.

第四,“不均衡的结果”:不均衡是一个有趣的词。它不只是意味着“不平等”,而是意味着曾经有过均衡,但后来失去了均衡。换句话说,事情一开始是均衡的,但后来有人赢了。大多数游戏都是如此——如果你玩,你要么赢,要么输。

Fourth, “a disequilibrial outcome”: disequilibrial is an interesting word. It does not simply mean “unequal”; it instead implies that at one time, there was equilibrium, but that it was then lost. In other words, things started out even, but then somebody won. This is certainly true of most games—if you play, you either win or lose.

所以这个定义指出了游戏的一些重要品质:

So this definition points out some key qualities important to games:

  • Q1. 比赛是任意参加的。

  • Q1. Games are entered willfully.

  • Q2. 游戏有目标。

  • Q2. Games have goals.

  • Q3. 游戏有冲突。

  • Q3. Games have conflict.

  • Q4. 游戏有规则。

  • Q4. Games have rules.

  • Q5. 游戏有胜有败。

  • Q5. Games can be won and lost.

让我们考虑另一个定义——这次不是来自学术界,而是来自设计界:

Let’s consider another definition—this time, not from academia but from the world of design:

游戏是需要玩家为实现某一目标而奋斗的具有内生意义的交互结构。

— 格雷格·科斯蒂基安

[A game is] an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle toward a goal.

—Greg Costikyan

其中一些非常清楚,但究竟什么是“内生”?我们很快就会讲到。让我们像上一个一样,把这个分开。

Some of this is pretty clear, but what in the world is “endogenous”? We’ll get to that shortly. Let’s take this one apart, like the last one.

首先是“互动结构”:科斯蒂基安希望明确指出,玩家是主动的,而不是被动的,玩家和游戏是相互互动的。游戏确实如此——它们有一个结构(由规则定义),你可以与之互动,游戏也可以与你互动。

First, “an interactive structure”: Costikyan wants to make it very clear that the player is active, and not passive, and that the player and game interact with one another. This is definitely true of games—they have a structure (defined by the rules) with which you can interact and which can interact with you.

第二,“为目标而奋斗”:我们再次看到了目标的概念,而奋斗则意味着某种冲突。但它意味着更多——它意味着挑战。在某种程度上,科斯蒂基安似乎试图定义游戏的构成要素,以及好游戏的构成要素。糟糕的游戏要么挑战性太低,要么挑战性太大。而好游戏的挑战性恰到好处。

Second, “struggle toward a goal”: again, we see the idea of a goal, and struggle implies some kind of conflict. But it implies more—it implies challenge. Partly, Costikyan seems to be trying to define not just what makes a game but what makes a good game. Bad games have little challenge or too much challenge. Good games have just the right amount.

第三,“内生意义”:内生是科斯蒂基安从生物学领域带到游戏设计中的一个绝妙术语,它的意​​思是“由各种因素引起的”内生价值是指“在有机体或系统内部”或“内部产生”的意义。那么什么是“内生价值”呢?科斯蒂基安提出了一个非常重要的观点,即在游戏内部有价值的东西只在游戏内部有价值。大富翁游戏的钱只在大富翁游戏中有意义。是游戏本身赋予了它这种意义。当我们玩游戏时,钱对我们来说非常重要。在游戏之外,钱就完全不重要了。内生价值对我们来说是一个非常有用的概念,因为它可以很好地衡量游戏的吸引力。轮盘赌游戏不一定非要用真钱玩——可以用代币或游戏币来玩。但游戏本身产生的内生价值很少。人们只有在涉及真钱时才会玩,因为游戏并不那么吸引人。游戏越吸引人,游戏内创造的内生价值就越大。一些大型多人角色扮演游戏对人们的吸引力如此之大,以至于虚拟的游戏物品实际上可以在游戏之外用真钱买卖。内生价值是一个非常有用的视角,它成为了镜头#7

Third, “endogenous meaning”: endogenous is an excellent term that Costikyan brought from the world of biology to game design, and it means “caused by factors inside the organism or system,” or “internally generated.” So what is “endogenous meaning?” Costikyan is making the very important point that things that have value inside the game have value only inside the game. Monopoly money only has meaning in the context of the game of Monopoly. It is the game itself that gave it that meaning. When we play the game, the money is very important to us. Outside the game, it is completely unimportant. Endogenous value is a very useful idea for us, because it is an excellent measure of how compelling a game really is. The game of roulette does not have to be played with real money—it can be played with tokens or play money. But the game, on its own, generates little endogenous value. People will only play it when real money is at stake, because it just isn’t that compelling a game. The more compelling a game is, the greater the endogenous value that is created within the game. Some massively multiplayer role playing games have proved so compelling to people that imaginary game items are actually bought and sold for real money outside the game. Endogenous value is such a useful perspective that it becomes Lens #7.

内生价值视角的一个例子: SNES 和 Sega Genesis 的Bubsy游戏是一款相当标准的平台游戏。你扮演一只试图导航的猫到达关卡终点,击败敌人、避开障碍物并收集毛线球以获得额外积分。然而,这些积分除了衡量你收集了多少东西之外没有任何用处。游戏中不会因为获得积分而给予任何其他奖励。大多数玩家一开始都会收集毛线球,期望它们很有价值,但玩了一小会儿之后,他们就完全忽略了它们,只专注于击败敌人、避开障碍物并到达关卡终点。为什么?因为玩家的动机(见镜头#6好奇心)仅仅是完成关卡。更高的分数对此没有帮助,因此毛线球没有内生价值。理论上,通过所有关卡的玩家可能会有新的动机:再次通过,但这次要获得尽可能高的分数。实际上,游戏本身非常困难,真正完成游戏的玩家数量肯定很少。

An example of the Lens of Endogenous Value: The game Bubsy for the SNES and Sega Genesis is a fairly standard platform game. You play a cat who tries to navigate to the end of levels, defeating enemies and avoiding obstacles and collecting yarn balls for extra points. However, the points serve no purpose other than to measure how many things you have collected. No other in-game reward is given for earning points. Most players gather yarn balls at first, with the expectation that they are valuable, but after playing a short while, they completely ignore them, focusing only on defeating enemies, avoiding obstacles, and getting to the end of the level. Why? Because the player’s motivation (see Lens #6: Curiosity) is merely to complete the levels. A higher score doesn’t help that, and thus the yarn balls have no endogenous value. Theoretically, a player who defeated all the levels might have a new motivation: defeat them again, but this time getting the highest score possible. In practice, the game itself was so difficult that the number of players who actually completed the game must have been small indeed.

Sega Genesis 的《刺猬索尼克 2》是一款类似的平台游戏,但没有遭受此问题。在《刺猬索尼克 2》中,玩家收集的是戒指而不是毛线球,收集的戒指数量对玩家来说非常重要——戒指具有很大的内生价值。为什么?因为携带戒指有助于保护您免受敌人的伤害,并且每当您收集一百个戒指时,您就会获得额外的生命,这增加了您完成所有关卡的机会。最终,《刺猬索尼克 2》是一款比《Bubsy》更引人注目的游戏,原因之一就是这种机制,它通过内生价值清楚地表明了其重要性。

Sonic the Hedgehog 2, for the Sega Genesis, was a similar platform game, but did not suffer from this problem. In Sonic 2, you collect rings instead of yarn balls, and the number of rings collected is very important to players—the rings have a lot of endogenous value. Why? Because carrying rings helps protect you from enemies, and every time you collect one hundred rings, you receive an extra life, which increases the chances you will be able to complete all the levels. In the end, Sonic 2 was a much more compelling game than Bubsy, and one of the reasons was this mechanism, which clearly shows its importance through endogenous value.

Costikyan 的定义给出了三个新特质,我们可以将其添加到我们的列表中:

Costikyan’s definition gives us three new qualities that we can add to our list:

  • Q6. 游戏是互动的。

  • Q6. Games are interactive.

  • Q7. 游戏有挑战性。

  • Q7. Games have challenge.

  • Q8. 游戏可以创造自己的内在价值。

  • Q8. Games can create their own internal value.

让我们再考虑一下游戏的一个定义:

Let’s consider one more definition of game:

游戏是一个封闭的、正式的系统,让玩家参与结构化的冲突,并以不平等的结果解决。

— 特蕾西·富勒顿、克里斯·斯温和史蒂文·霍夫曼

A game is a closed, formal system, that -engages players in structured conflict, and resolves in an unequal outcome.

—Tracy Fullerton, Chris Swain, and Steven Hoffman

前面的定义已经涵盖了大部分内容,但是我想挑选出其中的两个部分:

Most of this has been covered by the previous definitions, but there are two parts of this one I want to pick out:

首先,“吸引玩家”:玩家认为游戏具有吸引力,即游戏让玩家感到“精神沉浸”,这是个好点子。从技术上讲,我们可以说这是好游戏的特质,虽然不是所有游戏都如此,但这是一个重要点。

First, “engages players”: it is a good point that players find games to be engaging, that is, they make players feel “mentally immersed.” Technically, we might argue this is a quality of good games, though not all games, but it is an important point.

第二,“封闭的、正式的系统”:这意味着很多东西。“系统”意味着游戏是由相互关联的元素组成的,这些元素共同发挥作用。“正式”只是一种说法,表示系统定义明确,即它有规则。“封闭”是这里有趣的部分。它意味着系统有边界。其他定义中还没有明确提到这一点,尽管内生价值确实暗示了这一点。游戏边缘的这个边界已经被大肆渲染。约翰·赫伊津哈称之为“魔法圈”,它确实给人一种神奇的感觉。当我们在精神上“参与游戏”时,我们的想法、感受和价值观与“游戏之外”时截然不同。游戏只不过是一套规则,怎么能对我们产生这种神奇的效果呢?要理解这一点,我们必须看看人类的思想。

Second, “a closed, formal system”: this implies a lot of things. “System” means games are made of interrelated elements that work together. “Formal” is just a way of saying that the system is clearly defined, that is, it has rules. “Closed” is the interesting part here. It means that there are boundaries to the system. This hasn’t been mentioned explicitly yet in the other definitions, although the idea of endogenous value does imply it. Much has been made of this boundary at the edge of the game. Johan Huizinga called it “the magic circle,” and it does indeed have a kind of magical feeling to it. When we are mentally “in the game,” we have very different thoughts, feelings, and values than when we are “out of the game.” How can games, which are nothing more than sets of rules, have this magical effect on us? To understand, we have to look to the human mind.

让我们回顾一下从各种定义中挑选出的游戏品质列表:

Let’s review the list of game qualities we have picked out of these various definitions:

  • Q1. 比赛是任意参加的。

  • Q1. Games are entered willfully.

  • Q2. 游戏有目标。

  • Q2. Games have goals.

  • Q3. 游戏有冲突。

  • Q3. Games have conflict.

  • Q4. 游戏有规则。

  • Q4. Games have rules.

  • Q5. 游戏有胜有败。

  • Q5. Games can be won and lost.

  • Q6. 游戏是互动的。

  • Q6. Games are interactive.

  • Q7. 游戏有挑战性。

  • Q7. Games have challenge.

  • Q8. 游戏可以创造自己的内在价值。

  • Q8. Games can create their own internal value.

  • Q9. 游戏吸引玩家。

  • Q9. Games engage players.

  • Q10. 游戏是封闭的、正式的系统。

  • Q10. Games are closed, formal systems.

数量很多,不是吗?计算机研究员 Alan Kay 曾经建议我:“如果你编写了一个需要十个以上参数的软件子程序,请再看一遍。你可能漏掉了一些。”他这样说,如果你需要一个长列表来表达你的意思,那么你应该找到一个更好的方法来重新组织你的想法。事实上,这十件事的清单似乎并不完整。我们很可能漏掉了一些。

That’s a lot, isn’t it? Alan Kay, the computer researcher, once advised me: “If you’ve written a software subroutine that takes more than ten arguments, look again. You probably missed a few.” This was his way of saying that if you need a long list to convey what you mean, you should find a better way to regroup your ideas. And indeed, this list of ten things does not seem complete. It is likely that we have missed a few.

玩游戏这种简单、引人入胜、与生俱来的事情竟然需要如此复杂的定义,这确实有点奇怪。但也许我们处理这个问题的方式是错误的。我们不应该像以前一样从外向内地看待游戏体验,也就是说,专注于游戏与人的关系,也许我们应该从另一个方向来看:人们如何与游戏产生联系?

It does seem odd that something as simple, compelling, and innate to us as the playing of games would require such an unwieldy definition. But maybe we’re approaching this the wrong way. Instead of approaching the gameplay experience from the outside in, that is, focusing on how games relate to people, as we have been doing, perhaps we should look from the other direction: How do people relate to games?

人们为什么如此喜欢游戏?人们对此问题给出了许多答案,这些答案适用于部分游戏,但并非所有游戏:“我喜欢和朋友一起玩”、“我喜欢体育活动”、“我喜欢沉浸在另一个世界中的感觉”等等。但当人们谈论玩游戏时,他们经常给出一个答案,这个答案似乎适用于所有游戏:“我喜欢解决问题。”

What is it that people like so much about games? People give many answers to this question that are true for some but not all games: “I like playing with my friends,” “I like the physical activity,” “I like feeling immersed in another world,” and many more. But there is one answer that people often give when they talk about playing games, which seems to apply to all games: “I like solving problems.”

这有点奇怪,不是吗?通常,我们认为问题是一件负面的事情。但我们确实从解决问题中获得乐趣。而且,作为人类,我们非常擅长解决问题。我们复杂的大脑比其他任何动物都能更好地解决问题,这是我们作为一个物种的主要优势。所以我们喜欢解决问题,这并不奇怪。解决问题的乐趣似乎是一种进化而来的生存机制。喜欢解决问题的人会解决更多问题,而且解决问题的能力可能会更强,生存的可能性也更大。

That’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Normally, we think of problems as something negative. But we really do get pleasure from solving them. And, as humans, we are really good at solving problems. Our big complex brains can solve problems better than any of the other animals, and this is our primary advantage as a species. So it should not seem strange that it is something we enjoy. The enjoyment of problem solving seems to be an evolved survival mechanism. People who enjoy solving problems are going to solve more problems and probably get better at solving problems and be more likely to survive.

但大多数游戏真的都涉及问题解决吗?很难想出一款不涉及问题解决的游戏。任何有目标的游戏都会有效地向你展示一个需要解决的问题。例如:

But is it really true that most games involve problem solving? One is hard pressed to come up with a game that does not. Any game with a goal effectively has presented you with a problem to solve. Examples might be:

  • 找到一种方法来比其他队伍获得更多的分数。

  • Find a way to get more points than the other team.

  • 找到一种方法,先于其他玩家到达终点线。

  • Find a way to get to the finish line before the other players.

  • 找到完成这一关的方法。

  • Find a way to complete this level.

  • 在其他玩家消灭你之前,找到一种方法来消灭其他玩家。

  • Find a way to destroy the other player before they destroy you.

赌博游戏乍一看似乎是一个可能的例外。玩掷骰子游戏的人真的想解决问题吗?是的。问题在于如何正确计算风险并赚取尽可能多的钱。另一个棘手的例子是结果完全随机的游戏,例如儿童纸牌游戏“战争”。在“战争”中,两名玩家每人都有一叠扑克牌。他们同时翻开自己牌堆最上面的一张牌,看看谁的牌更大。牌更大的玩家赢得该轮,并保留两张牌。如果出现平局,则翻开更多牌,获胜者将获得更大的收益。游戏继续,直到一名玩家拥有所有牌。

Gambling games, at first, seem like a possible exception. Is someone playing craps really trying to solve a problem? Yes. The problem is how to take the right calculated risks and make as much money as possible. Another tricky example is a game where the outcome is completely random, such as the children’s card game of War. In War, the two players each have a stack of playing cards. In unison, they each flip over the top card from their stack to see who has the higher card. The player with the higher card wins the round keeping both cards. In the case of a tie, more cards are flipped, and the winner gets a larger take. Play continues until one player has all the cards.

这样的游戏怎么可能涉及解决问题呢?结果是预先确定的——玩家无需做出任何选择;他们只是逐渐揭晓谁是赢家。尽管如此,孩子们玩这个游戏和玩其他游戏一样开心,并没有特别区分这个游戏与其他游戏。这让我困惑了一段时间,所以我采取了文化人类学家的观点。我和一些孩子一起玩这个游戏,努力回忆作为一个孩子玩战争游戏的感觉。答案很快就显而易见了。对于孩子们来说,这是一个解决问题的游戏。他们试图解决的问题是“我能控制命运并赢得这个游戏吗?”他们尝试了各种各样的方法来做到这一点。他们希望,他们祈求命运,他们以各种疯狂的方式翻牌——所有迷信的行为,都是为了赢得游戏而尝试的。最终,他们学到了战争的教训:你无法控制命运。他们意识到这个问题是无法解决的,此时,这不再是一个游戏,而只是一种活动,他们很快就会转向有新问题需要解决的游戏。

How could a game like that possibly involve any problem solving? The outcome is predetermined—the players make no choices; they just gradually reveal who the winner will be. Nonetheless, children play this game just as happily as any other and draw no special distinction about this game differing somehow from other games. This baffled me for some time, so I took the cultural anthropologist point of view. I played the game with some children and tried hard to remember what it felt like to be a child playing War. And the answer quickly became obvious. For children, it is a problem-solving game. The problem they are trying to solve is “can I control fate and win this game?” And they try all kinds of ways to do it. They hope, they plead to the fates, they flip over the cards in all kinds of crazy ways—all superstitious behaviors, experimented with in an attempt to win the game. Ultimately, they learn the lesson of War: you cannot control fate. They realize the problem is unsolvable, and at that point, it is no longer a game, just an activity, and they soon move on to games with new problems to solve.

另一个可能的反对意见是,并非所有与游戏相关的活动都是解决问题的活动。通常,人们最喜欢游戏中的社交互动或体育锻炼等活动与解决问题无关。但是,虽然这些其他活动可能会改善游戏,但它们对游戏来说并不是必不可少的。当问题解决从游戏中移除时,它就不再是游戏,而只是一种活动。

Another possible objection one might raise is that not every activity associated with gameplaying is a problem-solving activity. Often, the things people enjoy most about games, such as social interaction or physical exercise, have nothing to do with problem solving. But while these other activities might improve a game, they are not essential to the game. When problem solving is removed from a game, it ceases to be a game and becomes just an activity.

因此,如果所有游戏都涉及某种形式的问题解决,而问题解决是定义我们人类的因素之一,那么也许我们应该更仔细地研究我们用于解决问题的心理机制,看看它们是否与游戏的属性有关。

So if all games involve some kind of problem solving and problem solving is one of the things that define us as a species, perhaps we should look more closely at the mental mechanisms we use for problem solving to see if they have anything to do with the properties of games.

问题解决 101

Problem Solving 101

让我们考虑一下当我们解决问题时我们做了什么以及它与我们的游戏品质编号列表有何关联。

Let’s consider what we do when we solve a problem and how it might relate to our numbered list of game qualities.

我们要做的第一件事就是陈述我们要解决的问题,即定义一个明确的目标(Q2)。接下来,我们框定问题。我们确定问题的边界和问题空间的性质。我们还确定我们可以使用哪些方法来解决问题;即确定问题的规则(Q4)。我们是如何做到这一点的有点难以描述。这不是一个完全口头的过程。这几乎就像我们的大脑有能力建立一个内部的、最小化的、简化的现实版本,其中只包括解决问题所需的必要相互关系。这就像一个更干净、更小的现实世界版本,我们可以更轻松地考虑和操纵或与之互动(Q6)。从某种意义上说,我们正在建立一个有目标的封闭的、正式的系统(Q10)。然后我们努力实现这个目标,这通常很有挑战性(Q7),因为它涉及某种冲突(Q3)。如果我们关心这个问题,我们很快就会参与(Q9)解决问题。当我们专注于此时,我们几乎忘记了现实世界,因为我们专注于内部问题空间。由于这个问题空间不是现实世界,只是现实世界的简化版本,解决问题对我们来说很重要,如果问题空间中的元素能让我们更接近解决问题的目标,它们就会迅速获得内部重要性,而这种重要性不需要与问题背景无关(Q8)。最终,我们战胜了问题或被问题打败,从而获胜或失败(Q5)。

One of the first things we do is to state the problem we are trying to solve, that is, define a clear goal (Q2). Next, we frame the problem. We determine its boundaries and the nature of the problem space. We also determine what methods we are allowed to use to solve the problem; that is, we determine the rules of the problem (Q4). How we do this is kind of hard to describe. It is not a completely verbal process. It is almost as if our minds are equipped to set up an internal, minimized, simplified version of reality that only includes the necessary interrelationships needed to solve the problem. This is like a cleaner, smaller version of the real-world situation, which we can more easily consider and manipulate or interact with (Q6). In a sense, we are establishing a closed, formal system (Q10) with a goal. We then work to reach that goal, which is usually challenging (Q7), because it involves some kind of conflict (Q3). If we care about the problem, we quickly become engaged (Q9) in solving it. When we are occupied in doing so, we kind of forget about the real world, since we are focused on our internal problem space. Since this problem space is not the real world and just a simplified version of it and solving the problem is important to us, elements in the problem space quickly gain an internal importance, if they get us closer to our goal of solving the problem, and this importance does not need to be relevant outside the context of the problem (Q8). Eventually, we defeat the problem or are defeated by it, thus winning or losing (Q5).

现在,我们终于看清了魔法圈的真正面目:我们的内部问题解决系统。但这并不会使它失去魔力。不知何故,我们的大脑能够根据现实世界创造微型现实。这些微观现实如此有效地提炼出特定问题的现实基本要素,以至于对这个内部世界的操纵以及从中得出的结论在现实世界中都是有效且有意义的。我们几乎不知道它是如何运作的——但它确实非常非常有效。

Now we see the magic circle for what it really is: our internal problem-solving system. This does not make it any less magical. Somehow, our minds have the ability to create miniature realities based on the real world. These microrealities have so effectively distilled the essential elements of reality for a particular problem that manipulations of this internal world, and conclusions drawn from it, are valid and meaningful in the real world. We have little idea of how this really works—but it does work very, very well.

我们对游戏的定义可能这么简单吗?

Could our definition of game possibly be this simple?

游戏是一种解决问题的活动。

A game is a problem-solving activity.

这不可能是对的。这可能是一个正确的陈述,但它太宽泛了。有很多解决问题的活动不是玩耍。其中很多感觉更像是工作。其中很多(“我们如何才能将这些小部件的生产成本降低 8%?”)实际上是工作。但我们已经确定,玩耍活动和工作活动之间的区别与活动本身无关,而是与一个人从事活动的动机有关。精明的读者会注意到,我们十个问题中只有九个我们的解决问题分析涵盖了所有十个品质。一个关键品质“游戏是自愿进入的”(Q1)被忽略了。不,游戏不能只是解决问题的活动。玩游戏的人还必须具有我们认为对游戏本质至关重要的特殊、难以定义的态度。因此,一个能很好地涵盖所有十个品质的定义可能是:

That can’t be right. It might be a true statement, but it is too broad. There are lots of problem-solving activities that are not play. Many of them feel more like work. Many of them (“How can we reduce the production costs of these widgets by 8%?”) literally are work. But we’ve already determined that the difference between a play activity and a work activity has nothing to do with the activity itself, but one’s motivation for doing the activity. Astute readers will notice that only nine of our ten qualities were covered in our problem-solving analysis. A key quality “games are entered willfully” (Q1) was omitted. No, games cannot simply be problem-solving activities. One who plays them must also have that special, hard-to-define attitude that we consider essential to the nature of play. So a definition that nicely covers all ten qualities might be:

游戏是一种以好玩的态度进行的解决问题的活动。

A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.

这是一个简单而优雅的定义,其优点是没有花哨的术语。无论你是否接受这个定义,将你的游戏视为需要解决的问题都是一个有用的视角,而这个视角就是镜头 #8

This is a simple, elegant definition, which has the advantage of no fancy jargon. Whether you accept this definition or not, viewing your game as a problem to be solved is a useful perspective, and that perspective is Lens #8.

我们的劳动成果

The Fruits of Our Labor

因此,我们开始了定义术语的漫长旅程。让我们回顾一下我们得出的结论:

So we have embarked on a long journey of defining our terms. Let’s review what we came up with:

  • 乐趣就是伴随着惊喜的快乐。

  • Fun is pleasure with surprises.

  • 游戏是一种满足好奇心的操作。

  • Play is manipulation that satisfies curiosity.

  • 玩具是你玩耍的物品。

  • A toy is an object you play with.

  • 好的玩具是可以让人玩得开心的物品。

  • A good toy is an object that is fun to play with.

  • 游戏是一种以好玩的态度进行的解决问题的活动。

  • A game is a problem-solving activity, approached with a playful attitude.

那么,这些就是宇宙秘密的钥匙吗?不是。它们只有在能让你了解如何制作更好的游戏时才有价值。如果能,那太好了!如果不是,那么我们最好继续前进,找到能帮到你的方法。你甚至可能不同意这些定义——如果是这样,那对你有好处!这意味着你在思考。所以继续思考吧!看看你能否想出比我这里更好的例子。定义这些术语的全部意义在于获得新的见解——见解是我们劳动的成果,而不是定义。也许你的新定义会带来新的、更好的见解,可以帮助我们所有人。有一件事我很确定:

So are these the keys to the secrets of the universe? No. They only have value if they give you some insight into how to make better games. If they do, great! If not, then we had best move on and find something that will. You might not even agree with these definitions—if that’s the case, then good for you! It means you are thinking. So keep thinking! See if you can come up with better examples than what I have here. The whole point of defining these terms is to gain new insights—it is the insights that are the fruits of our labors, not the definitions. Perhaps your new definitions will lead to new and better insights that can help us all. One thing I feel certain of:

只有了解生命本身的全部真相后,才能了解游戏的全部真相。

—雷曼和威蒂

The whole truth regarding play cannot be known until the whole truth regarding life itself is known.

—Lehman and Witty

所以我们就不要在这里浪费时间了。我们已经花了足够多的时间思考游戏是什么了。现在让我们来看看游戏是由什么构成的。

So let’s not dawdle here. We’ve spent enough time thinking about what a game is. Now let’s go see what a game is made of.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 罗杰·卡洛伊斯 (Roger Callois) 著的《人、游戏和游戏》。这本 1961 年出版的书长期以来一直是研究游戏的学者的最爱。尽管如此,它读起来还是很愉快的,并且包含了许多关于游戏本质的深刻见解。

  • Man, Play, and Games by Roger Callois. This 1961 book has long been a favorite of academics who study games. Despite that, it is pleasing to read and contains a number of thoughtful insights about the nature of gameplay.

  • 詹姆斯·P·卡斯的《有限与无限游戏》。这本简短但鼓舞人心的书对游戏与生活的关系进行了令人着迷的哲学阐述。

  • Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. This brief but inspiring book is a fascinating philosophical statement about the relationship between games and life.

  • 《我们为什么玩游戏:没有故事也能激发情感的四个关键》作者:妮可·拉扎罗。对“乐趣”维度的一次发人深省的探索。

  • Why We Play Games: Four Keys to Emotion without Story by Nicole Lazzaro. A provocative exploration into the dimensions of “fun.”

  • Katie Salen 和 Eric Zimmerman 合著的《游戏规则》 ,第 7 章和第 8 章这两章对游戏的定义进行了非常深思熟虑的思考。

  • Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Chapters 7 and 8. These two chapters contain some very thoughtful consideration of the definition of a game.

  • 《蚱蜢:游戏、生活和乌托邦》作者:伯纳德·苏茨(发音为“sweets”)。这是对游戏本质的一次发人深省的哲学考察。苏茨对“游戏”的定义让我很生气,但我从来都无法反驳它。

  • The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard Suits (pronounced “sweets”). An incredibly thought-provoking philosophical examination of the nature of games. Suits’ definition of “game” infuriates me, yet I have never been able to refute it.

第五

CHAPTER FIVE

游戏由元素组成

The Game Consists of Elements



5.1

FIGURE

5.1

小游戏是由什么组成的?

What Are Little Games Made Of?



5.2

FIGURE

5.2

我女儿三岁的时候,有一天她变得很好奇,想知道不同的东西是由什么构成的。她在房间里跑来跑去,兴奋地指着东西,试图用她的问题难倒我:

When my daughter was three years old, she became quite curious one day about what different things were made of. She ran around the room, excitedly pointing to things, trying to stump me with her questions:

  • “爸爸,桌子是什么做的?”

  • “Daddy, what is the table made of?”

  • “木头。”

  • “Wood.”

  • “爸爸,勺子是什么做的?”

  • “Daddy, what is the spoon made of?”

  • “金属。”

  • “Metal.”

  • “爸爸,这个玩具是什么做的?”

  • “Daddy, what is this toy made of?”

  • “塑料。”

  • “Plastic.”

当她四处寻找新物体时,我把目光转向她,并提出了自己的问题。

As she looked around for a new object, I turned it around on her, with a question of my own.

  • “你是由什么构成的?”

  • “What are you made of?”

她停下来思考。她低头看着自己的双手,把它们翻过来研究。然后,她高兴地宣布:

She paused to consider. She looked down at her hands, turning them over and studying them. And then, brightly, she announced:

  • “我是皮肤做的!”

  • “I’m made of skin!”

对于一个三岁的孩子来说,这是一个非常合理的结论。当然,随着年龄的增长,我们越来越了解人究竟是由什么构成的——复杂的骨骼、肌肉、器官和其他部位之间的关系。然而,即使作为成年人,我们对人体解剖学的理解也是不完整的(例如,你能指出你的脾脏,或者描述它的功能或工作原理吗?),这对我们大多数人来说是可以接受的,因为我们通常知道的已经足够多了。

And for a three-year old, this is a perfectly reasonable conclusion. As we get older, of course, we learn more about what people are really made of—the complex relations between bones, muscles, organs, and the rest. Even as adults, though, our understanding of human anatomy is incomplete (can you point to your spleen, for instance, or describe what it does or how?), and this is acceptable for most of us, because we generally know enough to get by.

但我们期望医生能做到更多。医生需要真正了解我们体内的一切是如何运作的,它们是如何相互关联的,以及当出现问题时,如何找出问题的根源并解决它。

But we expect more from a doctor. A doctor needs to know, really know, how everything works inside us, how it all interrelates, and, when something goes wrong, how to figure out the source of the problem and fix it.

如果你到目前为止只是一名游戏玩家,那么你可能还没有过多考虑过游戏是由什么构成的。例如,想想电子游戏,你可能像大多数人一样,对游戏有一个模糊的概念,即游戏就是这种故事世界,有一些规则,并且有一个计算机程序潜伏在某个地方,以某种方式让一切运转起来。而对于大多数人来说,了解这些就足够了。

If you have just been a gameplayer up until now, you probably haven’t thought too much about what a game is made of. Thinking about a videogame, for example, you might, like most people, have a vague idea that a game is this kind of story world, with some rules and a computer program lurking around somewhere in there that somehow makes it all go. And that’s enough for most people to know in order to get by.

但你猜怎么着?你现在是一名医生。你需要非常了解你的病人(游戏)到底是由什么构成的,他们的各个部分如何组合在一起,以及是什么让他们运转。当事情出错时,你需要找出真正的原因并想出最好的解决方案,否则你的游戏肯定会失败。如果这听起来还不够难,你将被要求做大多数医生从未被要求做的事情:创造从未有人见过的新型生物(全新的游戏)并让它们活过来。

But guess what? You’re a doctor now. You need to know, intimately, what your patients (games) are really made of, how their pieces all fit together, and what makes them tick. When things go wrong, you’ll need to spot the true cause and come up with the best solution, or your game will surely die. And if that doesn’t sound hard enough, you’ll be asked to do things that most doctors are never asked: to create new kinds of organisms (radically new games) no one has ever seen before and bring them to life.

本书的大部分内容都致力于发展这一基本理解。我们对解剖学的研究始于对构成每场比赛的四个基本元素的理解。

Much of this book is devoted to developing this essential understanding. Our study of anatomy begins with an understanding of the four basic elements that comprise every game.

四个基本要素

The Four Basic Elements

有很多方法可以分解和分类构成游戏的众多元素。我发现图 5.3中所示的类别(我称之为元素四元组)非常有用。让我们简要地看一下这四个元素以及它们之间的关系:

There are many ways to break down and classify the many elements that form a game. I have found that the categories shown in Figure 5.3, which I call the elemental tetrad, are very useful. Let’s look briefly at each of the four and how they relate to the others:

  1. 机制:这些是游戏的程序和规则。机制描述了游戏的目标、玩家可以和不可以尝试实现目标的方式以及尝试时会发生什么。如果将游戏与更线性的娱乐体验(书籍、电影等)进行比较,您会注意到,虽然线性体验涉及技术、故事和美学,但它们不涉及机制,因为正是机制使游戏成为游戏。当您选择一组对游戏玩法至关重要的机制时,您需要选择可以支持它们的技术、向玩家明确强调它们的美学以及让玩家理解您的(有时很奇怪的)游戏机制的故事。第12 章第 14章将详细介绍机制。



    5.3

  2. Mechanics: These are the procedures and rules of your game. Mechanics describe the goal of your game, how players can and cannot try to achieve it, and what happens when they try. If you compare games to more linear entertainment experiences (books, movies, etc.), you will note that while linear experiences involve technology, story, and aesthetics, they do not involve mechanics, for it is mechanics that make a game a game. When you choose a set of mechanics as crucial to your gameplay, you will need to choose technology that can support them, aesthetics that emphasize them clearly to players, and a story that allows your (sometimes strange) game mechanics to make sense to the players. Mechanics will be given detailed attention in Chapters 12 through 14.

    FIGURE

    5.3

  3. 故事:这是游戏中展开的事件序列。它可能是线性和预先编写的,也可能是分支和突发事件。当你想通过游戏讲述一个故事时,你必须选择既能强化故事又能让故事浮现出来的机制。像任何讲故事的人一样,你会想要选择有助于强化故事理念的美学和最适合游戏中特定故事的技术。故事及其与游戏机制的特殊关系将在第17 章和第 18章中进行研究。

  4. Story: This is the sequence of events that unfolds in your game. It may be linear and pre-scripted, or it may be branching and emergent. When you have a story you want to tell through your game, you have to choose the mechanics that will both strengthen that story and let that story emerge. Like any storyteller, you will want to choose the aesthetics that help reinforce the ideas of your story and the technology that is best suited to the particular story that will come out of your game. Story, and its special relationship with game mechanics, will be studied in Chapters 17 and 18.

  5. 美学:游戏的外观、声音、气味、味道和感觉。美学是游戏设计中非常重要的一个方面,因为它与玩家的体验有着最直接的关系。当你想让玩家体验并沉浸其中的某种外观或基调时,你需要选择一种技术,它不仅可以让美学得以体现,还可以放大和强化它们。你会想要选择让玩家感觉自己身处美学所定义的世界中的机制,你会想要一个故事和一系列事件,让你的美学以正确的节奏出现并产生最大的影响。第23 章将探讨选择美学来强化游戏其他元素以创造真正令人难忘的体验的技巧。

  6. Aesthetics: This is how your game looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels. Aesthetics are an incredibly important aspect of game design since they have the most direct relationship to a player’s experience. When you have a certain look, or tone, that you want players to experience and become immersed in, you will need to choose a technology that will not only allow the aesthetics to come through but amplify and reinforce them. You will want to choose the mechanics that make players feel like they are in the world that the aesthetics have defined, and you will want a story with a set of events that let your aesthetics emerge at the right pace and have the most impact. The skill of choosing aesthetics that reinforce the other elements of the game to create a truly memorable experience will be examined in Chapter 23.

  7. 技术:我们在这里指的并不是“高科技”,而是指任何使游戏成为可能的材料和互动,例如纸和铅笔、塑料筹码或高功率激光。你为游戏选择的技术使它能够做某些事情,同时禁止它做其他事情。技术本质上是美学发生的媒介,是机制发生的媒介,也是故事讲述的媒介。我们将在第29 章中详细讨论如何为你的游戏选择正确的技术。

  8. Technology: We are not exclusively referring to “high technology” here, but to any materials and interactions that make your game possible such as paper and pencil, plastic chits, or high-powered lasers. The technology you choose for your game enables it to do certain things and prohibits it from doing other things. The technology is essentially the medium in which the aesthetics take place, in which the mechanics will occur, and through which the story will be told. We will talk in detail about how to choose the right technology for your game in Chapter 29.

重要的是要明白,没有任何元素比其他元素更重要。四元组在这里以菱形排列,不是为了显示任何相对重要性,而只是为了帮助说明“可见性梯度”,即技术元素往往对玩家最不可见,美学最明显,机制和故事介于两者之间。它可以以其他方式排列。例如,为了强调技术和机制是“左脑”元素,而故事和美学是“右脑”元素,您可以将四元组排列成正方形。为了强调元素之间的紧密联系,可以将它们排列成四面体金字塔——这真的无关紧要。

It is important to understand that none of the elements are more important than the others. The tetrad is arranged here in a diamond shape not to show any relative importance but only to help illustrate the “visibility gradient,” that is, the fact that technological elements tend to be the least visible to the players, aesthetics are the most visible, and mechanics and story are somewhere in the middle. It can be arranged in other ways. For example, to highlight the fact that technology and mechanics are “left brain” elements, whereas story and aesthetics are “right brain” elements, you might arrange the tetrad in a square. To emphasize the strong connectedness of the elements to one another, they could be arranged as a tetrahedral pyramid—it really doesn’t matter.

理解这四个要素的重要之处在于,它们都是必不可少的。无论你设计什么游戏,你都将对所有四个要素做出重要的决定。没有哪一个比其他的更重要,每一个都对其他的都有强大的影响。我发现很难让人们相信这四个要素是平等的。游戏设计师倾向于认为机制是主要的;艺术家倾向于认为美学是主要的;工程师是主要的;作家是主要的。我想,相信你的作品是最重要的,这是人的天性。但是,相信我,作为一名游戏设计师,它们都是你的作品。每一个都对玩家的游戏体验有同样强大的影响,因此,每一个都值得同等的关注。在使用镜头 #9时,这个观点至关重要。

The important thing to understand about the four elements is that they are all essential. No matter what game you design, you will make important decisions about all four elements. None is more important than the others, and each one powerfully influences each of the others. I have found that it is hard to get people to believe in the equality of the four elements. Game designers tend to believe that mechanics are primary; artists tend to believe the same about aesthetics; engineers, technology; and writers, story. I suppose it is human nature to believe your piece is the most important. But, believe me, as a game designer, they are all your piece. Each has an equally powerful effect on the player’s experience of your game, and thus, each deserves equal attention. This point of view is crucial when using Lens #9.

以西角俊弘 (Taito 1978) 的游戏设计为例。如果您不熟悉这款游戏,请快速进行网络搜索,以便了解基础知识。我们将从四个基本元素的角度来考虑设计。

Consider the design of the game Space Invaders (Taito 1978) by Toshihiro Nishikado. If (somehow) you aren’t familiar with the game, do a quick web search so that you understand the basics. We will consider the design from the points of view of the four basic elements.

技术:所有新游戏都需要某种创新。《太空侵略者》背后的技术是专门为游戏设计的。这是第一款允许玩家与前进的军队作战的视频游戏,而这只能归功于为其创建的定制主板。这项技术使一套全新的游戏机制成为可能。它就是为此目的而创建的。

Technology: All new games need to be innovative in some way. The technology behind Space Invaders was custom designed for the game. It was the first video game that allowed a player to fight an advancing army, and this was only possible due to the custom motherboard that was created for it. An entirely new set of gameplay mechanics was made possible with this technology. It was created solely for that purpose.

机制: 《太空侵略者》的游戏机制很新,总是让人兴奋。但更重要的是,它很有趣,而且很平衡。玩家不仅可以向前进的外星人射击,外星人会向玩家开火,玩家还可以躲在盾牌后面,让外星人摧毁盾牌(或者玩家可以选择自己摧毁盾牌)。此外,还可以通过射击神秘的飞碟来获得奖励积分。游戏不需要时间限制,因为游戏可以以两种方式结束:玩家的飞船可以被外星人炸弹摧毁,而前进的外星人最终会到达玩家的家乡星球。离玩家最近的外星人更容易射击,得分也较低。离玩家较远的外星人得分较高。另一个有趣的游戏机制是,你摧毁的 48 个外星人越多,入侵军队的速度就越快。这让人兴奋,也催生了一些有趣的故事。基本上,《太空侵略者》背后的游戏机制非常可靠、平衡,在当时非常具有创新性。

Mechanics: The gameplay mechanic of Space Invaders was new, which is always exciting. But more than that, it was interesting and well balanced. Not only does a player shoot at advancing aliens that shoot back at him, the player can hide behind shields that the aliens can destroy (or that the player can choose to destroy themself). Further, there is the possibility to earn bonus points by shooting a mysterious flying saucer. There is no need for a time limit, because the game can end two ways: the player’s ships can be destroyed by alien bombs and the advancing aliens will eventually reach the player’s home planet. Aliens closest to the player are easier to shoot and worth fewer points. Aliens farther away are worth more points. One more interesting game mechanic is that the more of the 48 aliens you destroy, the faster the invading army gets. This builds excitement and makes for the emergence of some interesting stories. Basically, the game mechanics behind Space Invaders are very solid and well balanced and were very innovative at the time.

故事:这款游戏不需要有故事。它本来可以是一个三角形向方块射击的抽象游戏。但有了故事,游戏就更加刺激,也更容易理解。然而,《太空侵略者》的原始故事根本不是外星侵略者的故事。它原本是一款向前进的人类士兵开火的游戏。据说 Taito 认为这传达了一个坏信息,所以故事被改变了。新的故事是关于前进的外星人的故事,效果更好,原因如下:

Story: This game didn’t need to have a story. It could have been an abstract game where a triangle shoots at blocks. But having a story makes it far more exciting and easier to understand. The original story for Space Invaders, though, was not a story of alien invaders at all. It was originally a game where you fired at an army of advancing human soldiers. It is said that Taito decided this sent a bad message, so the story was changed. The new story, a story about advancing aliens, works much better for several reasons:

  • 当时已经发布了几款以战争为主题的游戏(例如 1976 年的《海狼》)。当时,一款可以参与太空战斗的游戏其实还是很新颖的。

  • Several war-themed games had already been released (e.g., Sea Wolf, 1976). A game where you could be in a space battle was actually novel at the time.

  • 有些人对于射击他人的战争游戏感到厌恶(1976 年的《死亡飞车》就使电子游戏中的暴力成为一个敏感话题)。

  • Some people are squeamish about war games where you shoot people (Death Race, 1976, had made violence in videogames a sensitive issue).

  • “高科技”计算机图形非常适合未来主题的游戏。

  • The “high-tech” computer graphics lent themselves well to a game with a futuristic theme.

  • 行进中的士兵必然是在地面上行走,这意味着游戏将采用“自上而下”的视角。《太空侵略者》给人的感觉是外星人正逐渐向你的星球表面降落,而你则向他们射击。不知何故,盘旋、飞行的外星人是可信的,并且使故事更具戏剧性——“如果他们着陆,我们就完了!”故事的改变允许改变摄像机视角,从而对美学产生巨大影响。

  • Marching soldiers are necessarily walking on the ground, which means the game would have had a “top-down” view. Space Invaders gives the sense that the aliens are gradually lowering toward the surface of your planet and you are shooting up at them. Somehow, hovering, flying aliens are believable and make for a more dramatic story—“if they touch down, we’re doomed!” A change in story allowed for a change in camera perspective with a dramatic impact on aesthetics.

美学:有些人可能会嘲笑这些视觉效果,现在看来它们太原始了,但设计师用很少的资源做了很多事情。外星人并不完全相同。有三个不同的设计,每个设计的价值不同。它们各自执行一个简单的两帧“行进”动画,效果非常好。显示屏无法显示颜色,但简单的技术变化解决了这个问题!由于玩家被限制在屏幕底部,外星人在中间,飞碟在顶部,因此将彩色的半透明塑料条粘在屏幕上,这样您的飞船和盾牌就是绿色的,外星人是白色的,飞碟是红色的。游戏技术的这种简单变化只是因为游戏机制的性质而起作用,并且极大地改善了游戏的美感。音频是美学的另一个重要组成部分。行进的入侵者发出一种心跳的声音,随着它们的速度加快,心跳也加快了,这对玩家产生了非常直观的影响。还有其他音效也有助于讲述故事。最令人难忘的是当您的飞船被外星导弹击中时发出的惩罚性嗡嗡声。但并非所有美学都在游戏中!太空侵略者的橱柜设计精美,引人注目,有助于讲述邪恶的外星入侵者的故事。

Aesthetics: Some may sneer at the visuals, which now seem so primitive, but the designer did a lot with a little. The aliens are not all identical. There are three different designs, each worth a different amount of points. They each perform a simple two-frame “marching” animation that is very effective. The display was not capable of color—but a simple technology change took care of that! Since the player was confined to the bottom of the screen, the aliens to the middle, and the saucer to the top, colored strips of translucent plastic were glued to the screen so that your ship and shields were green, the aliens were white, and the saucer was red. This simple change in the technology of the game worked only because of the nature of the game mechanics and greatly improved the aesthetics of the game. Audio is another important component of aesthetics. The marching invaders made a sort of heartbeat noise, and as they sped up, the heartbeat sped up, which had a very visceral effect on the player. There were other sound effects that helped tell the story too. The most memorable was a punishing, buzzing crunch noise when your ship was hit with an alien missile. But not all aesthetics are in the game! The cabinet for Space Invaders had a design that was attractive and eye-catching that helped tell the story of the evil alien invaders.

《太空侵略者》成功的关键部分在于,这四个基本元素都在朝着同一个目标努力——让玩家体验与外星军队作战的奇幻体验。每个元素都为其他元素做出了妥协,显然,一个元素的缺陷往往会促使设计师对另一个元素做出改变。当你通过元素四重奏的视角审视你的设计时,你可能会得到这些聪明的见解。

Part of the key to the success of Space Invaders was that the four basic elements were all working hard toward the same goal—to let the player experience the fantasy of battling an alien army. Each of the elements made compromises for the other, and clearly deficits in one element often inspired the designer to make changes in another. These are the sort of clever insights you are likely to have when you view your design through the Lens of the Elemental Tetrad.



5.4

FIGURE

5.4

皮肤和骨骼

Skin and Skeleton

本书将更详细地讨论这四个基本元素以及游戏结构的其他许多方面。如果能学到足够多的知识,让你能够透过游戏的外表(玩家的体验)看到骨架(构成游戏的元素),这是一件很棒的事情。但你必须警惕许多设计师都会陷入的一个可怕陷阱。一些设计师总是在思考游戏内部的详细运作,却忘记了玩家体验。仅仅了解各种游戏元素以及它们之间的相互关系是不够的——你必须始终考虑它们与体验的关系。这是游戏设计的巨大挑战之一:在感受游戏体验的同时,了解哪些元素和元素交互导致了这种体验以及原因。你必须同时看到外表和骨架。如果你只关注外表,你就会思考体验的感觉,但不会理解为什么会有这种感觉,也不会理解如何改进它。如果你只关注骨架,你制作的游戏结构在理论上很漂亮,但在实践中可能会很糟糕。如果您可以同时关注两者,您就可以了解它们的工作原理,同时感受到游戏体验的威力。

We will be discussing the four basic elements in more detail throughout this book as well as many other aspects of game anatomy. It is a wonderful thing to learn enough so that you can see past the skin of a game (the player’s experience) into the skeleton (the elements that make up the game). But you must beware of a terrible trap that many designers fall into. Some designers, thinking constantly about the detailed internal workings of games, forget about the player experience. It is not enough to merely understand the various game elements and how they interrelate with one another—you must always consider how they relate to the experience. This is one of the great challenges of game design: to simultaneously feel the experience of your game while understanding which elements and elemental interactions are causing that experience and why. You must see skin and skeleton at once. If you focus only on skin, you can think about how an experience feels, but not understand why it feels that way or how to improve it. If you focus only on skeleton, you can make a game structure that is beautiful in theory, but potentially horrible in practice. If you can manage to focus on both at once, you can see how it all works while feeling the power of your game’s experience at the same time.

第 2 章中,我们讨论了观察和分析自己的体验的重要性和挑战。尽管这很有挑战性,但还不够。您还必须能够思考游戏中使体验成为可能的元素。这需要练习,就像第2 章的观察技巧需要练习一样。从本质上讲,您需要培养的技能是观察自己的体验,同时思考该体验的根本原因的能力。

In Chapter 2, we discussed the importance and the challenge of observing and analyzing your own experiences. As challenging as that is, it is not enough. You must also be able to think about the elements in your game that make the experience possible. This takes practice, just as the observation techniques of Chapter 2 take practice. Essentially, the skill you need to develop is the ability to observe your own experience while thinking about the underlying causes of that experience.

这项重要技能称为全息设计,在镜头#10中有详细介绍。

This important skill is called holographic design, and it is detailed in Lens #10.

在后续章节中,我们将更详细地讨论游戏的构成要素。现在让我们来看一下这些要素需要协同工作的原因。

In future chapters, we will say much more about the elements that make up a game. Now let’s turn our attention to the reason these elements need to work together.

第六

CHAPTER SIX

元素支撑主题

The Elements Support a Theme



6.1

FIGURE

6.1

要写一本伟大的书,你必须选择一个伟大的主题。

—赫尔曼·梅尔维尔

To write a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

—Herman Melville

单纯的游戏

Mere Games

伟大的主题和深刻的含义往往与文学或伟大的艺术作品有关。“游戏”追求同样的伟大程度是否太自命不凡了?

Great themes and deep meanings are often associated with literature or with great works of art. Is it pretentious for a “mere game” to aspire to the same levels of greatness?

作为游戏设计师,我们必须面对一个痛苦的事实:许多人认为各种形式的游戏都是毫无意义的消遣。通常,当我向持有这种观点的人施压时,我可以让他们承认一些对他们来说非常重要的游戏。有时是他们玩过的或虔诚观看的体育运动。有时是他们与重要人物关系的基​​石——纸牌或棋盘游戏。有时是他们认同的故事情节和角色的电子游戏。当我指出游戏毫无意义的虚伪,而游戏有意义时,他们解释说:“嗯,我真正关心的不是游戏本身,而是游戏带来的体验。”但正如我们所讨论的,体验并非随机与游戏相关联;它们是玩家与游戏互动时产生的。体验中对人们重要的部分,例如体育赛事的戏剧性、桥牌选手之间的友情或象棋爱好者之间的竞争,都是由游戏的设计决定的。

As game designers, we must confront the painful truth that many people view games, in all their forms, as meaningless diversions. Usually, when I press people who hold this view, I can get them to admit some game that is very important to them. Sometimes it is a sport, either one they have played or one they watch religiously. Sometimes it is a card or board game that formed the cornerstone of their relationship with someone important to them. Sometimes it is a videogame with a storyline and characters that they identify with. When I point out the hypocrisy of games as meaningless, but a game as meaningful, they explain, “Well, it really wasn’t the game I cared about—it was the experience that went with the game.” But as we’ve discussed, experiences aren’t just associated with games at random; they are what emerge when players interact with a game. The parts of the experience that are important to people, such as the drama of a sporting event, the camaraderie between bridge players, or the rivalry of chess enthusiasts, all are determined by the design of the game.

有些人认为游戏,尤其是电子游戏,不可能深刻而有意义,因为它们本质上太过原始。20 世纪初,当电影还是无声黑白电影时,人们也曾提出过同样的论点。随着技术的进步,这种论点逐渐消失。游戏也面临同样的情况。20 世纪 70 年代,电子游戏被简化到几乎完全抽象的程度。如今,它们可以包含文本、图片、视频、声音和音乐。随着技术的进步,人类生活和表达的越来越多的方面将被融入到游戏中。没有什么不能成为游戏的一部分。你可以把一幅画、一个广播节目或一部电影放进游戏中,但你不能把游戏放进这些其他东西中。所有这些其他类型的媒体,以及所有即将出现的媒体,都是游戏的子集。在技术极限下,游戏将取代所有其他媒体。

Some people make the argument that games, especially videogames, cannot be deep and meaningful because they are simply too primitive in nature. The same argument was made about film at the beginning of the twentieth century when it was silent and black and white. As technology increased, this argument faded away. And the same is happening for games. In the 1970s, videogames were so simplified as to be almost completely abstract. Today, they can include text, pictures, video, sound, and music. As technology advances, more and more aspects of human life and expression will be integrated into games. There is nothing that cannot be part of a game. You can put a painting, a radio broadcast, or a movie into a game, but you cannot put a game into these other things. All these other types of media, and all media that is to come, are subsets of games. At their technological limit, games will subsume all other media.

问题在于,游戏直到最近才成为一种严肃的表达媒介。世界需要时间来适应这个想法。但我们没有理由等待。我们现在就可以创造具有强大主题的游戏。但为什么呢?为什么要这样做?出于对艺术表达的自私需求?不。因为我们是设计师。艺术表达不是我们的目标。我们的目标是创造强大的体验。有可能创造出没有主题或主题非常薄弱的​​游戏。但是,如果我们的游戏具有统一的、引起共鸣的主题,我们创造的体验将更加强大。

Really, the problem is that games have only recently emerged as anything like a serious medium of expression. It will take time for the world to grow used to this idea. But we have no reason to wait. We can create games with powerful themes right now. But why? Why do this? Out of a selfish need for artistic expression? No. Because we are designers. Artistic expression is not our goal. Our goal is to create powerful experiences. It is possible to create games that do not have themes or that have very weak themes. However, if our games have unifying, resonant themes, the experiences we create will be much, much stronger.

统一主题

Unifying Themes

围绕单一主题进行设计的主要好处是,游戏的所有元素都会相互加强,因为它们都朝着一个共同的目标努力。有时,最好在创建游戏时就让主题浮现出来。越早确定主题,事情对你来说就越容易,因为你将有一个轻松的方法来决定某些东西是否适合你的游戏:如果它能强化主题,它就保留下来,但如果不能,它就被删除。

The primary benefit of basing your design around a single theme is that all of the elements of your game will reinforce one another, since they will all be working toward a common goal. Sometimes it is best to let a theme emerge as you are creating the game. The sooner you have settled on a theme, the easier things will be for you, because you will have an easy method of deciding if something belongs in your game or not: If it reinforces the theme, it stays, but if it doesn’t, it goes.

使用主题来增强游戏体验的力量有两个简单的步骤:

There are two simple steps to using a theme to strengthen the power of your game’s experience:

  • 步骤 1:确定你的主题是什么。

  • Step 1: Figure out what your theme is.

  • 第 2 步:用尽一切可能的方法来强化该主题。

  • Step 2: Use every means possible to reinforce that theme.

听起来很简单,但什么是主题?主题就是你的游戏的主题。它是将整个游戏联系在一起的理念——所有元素都必须支持的理念。如果你不知道你的主题是什么,你的游戏很可能无法尽可能地吸引玩家。大多数游戏主题都是基于体验的;也就是说,设计的目标是为玩家提供必要的体验。

Sounds easy, but what is a theme? The theme is what your game is about. It is the idea that ties your entire game together—the idea that all the elements must support. If you don’t know what your theme is, it is very likely that your game is not engaging people as much as it could. Most game themes are experience based; that is, the goal of the design is to deliver an essential experience to the player.

设计师 Rich Gold 在他的书《Plenitude》中描述了主题化的一个基本例子。小时候,他有一本关于大象的书。这本书的理念很简单:为儿童提供一种体验,让他们了解大象是什么。从某种意义上说,你可以说主题是“什么是大象?”因此,步骤 1 已经完成。这将我们带到步骤 2:使用一切可能的方法来强化该主题。作者做了显而易见的事情 - 这本书包含有关大象的文字和大象的图片。但他们更进一步,将整本书,封面和页面都剪成了大象的形状。在每个转折点,你都需要寻找机会以聪明和意想不到的方式强化你的主题。

Designer Rich Gold describes an elementary example of theming in his book The Plenitude. As a child, he had a book about elephants. The idea of the book was simple: to deliver an experience to children that lets them understand what elephants were. In a sense, you could say the theme was “What are elephants?” So, step 1 is done. This brings us to step 2: use every means possible to reinforce that theme. The authors did the obvious—the book contained text about elephants and pictures of elephants. But they took it a step further and cut the entire book, cover and pages, into the shape of an elephant, as well. At every turn, you need to look for opportunities to reinforce your theme in clever and unexpected ways.

让我根据我为迪士尼制作的一款虚拟现实游戏《加勒比海盗:海盗黄金之战》举一个更详细的例子。我们的团队(迪士尼 VR 工作室)的任务是创建一个流行的加勒比海盗主题公园游乐设施的互动改编版,这个游乐设施可以在所有迪士尼乐园中以各种形式看到。我们知道要把它放在计算机增强虚拟环境 (CAVE) 中,它基本上是迪士尼探索中心(迪士尼世界虚拟现实中心)的一个小房间,墙上有 3D 投影,体验必须持续大约五分钟,但没有设定故事情节或特定的游戏目标。

Let me give a more detailed example based on a virtual reality game I worked on for Disney called Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold. Our team (the Disney VR Studio) was given the assignment of creating an interactive adaptation of the popular Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride, which can be seen in various incarnations at all the Disney parks. We knew we were going to put it in a Computer Augmented Virtual Environment (CAVE), which is basically a small room with 3D projections on the walls at DisneyQuest (Disney’s virtual reality center at Disney World), and the experience had to be about five minutes long, but no storyline or specific game goals had been set.

我们已经有了初步的主题:这个景点将与海盗有关,这缩小了范围,但我们希望更具体一些。我们想从哪些角度看待海盗?我们可以从以下几个角度来看待:

We already had the beginnings of a theme: this attraction was going to be about pirates, which narrowed things down, but we were hoping to be more specific. What point of view did we want to take about pirates? There are several we could have taken:

  • 一部关于海盗的历史纪录片。

  • A historical documentary about pirates.

  • 海盗船之间的战斗。

  • A battle between competing pirate ships.

  • 寻找隐藏的海盗宝藏。

  • A search for hidden pirate treasure.

  • 海盗是恶棍,必须被消灭。

  • Pirates are villains and must be destroyed.

还有其他几个也浮现在我们脑海中。你可以看到,即使是像“海盗”这样狭隘的主题,我们仍然没有真正的主题,因为我们可以围绕海盗这个概念创造许多可能的体验。我们开始做研究,寻找游戏创意、美学创意,并希望有一个清晰、统一的主题。

Several others came to mind as well. You can see that even with something as narrow as “pirates,” we still didn’t really have a theme, because there are many possible experiences around the idea of pirates that we could create. We started doing research, looking for game ideas, aesthetic ideas, and hopefully a clear, unifying theme.

我们阅读了大量有关海盗历史的资料,也研究了其他人制作的以海盗为主题的电子游戏。我们还与参与创作原版加勒比海盗游乐设施的人员进行了交谈。我们得到了很多很好的细节,但并没有更接近主题。有一天,我们挤进一辆车,前往迪士尼乐园,近距离研究这个游乐设施。在公园开放时间之前,我们乘坐了几十次,疯狂地记笔记、拍照。这个游乐设施的细节非常多,非常引人注目。我们可以看出细节非常重要。但故事呢?奇怪的是,加勒比海盗游乐设施并没有讲述一个连贯的故事。它只是展示了几个身临其境的海盗做海盗事情的画面。从某种意义上说,这是一个真正的优势:故事留给了乘客的想象力。

We read a lot about the history of pirates, and we looked at pirate-themed video games other people had made. We talked to people who had been involved in the creation of the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride. We got lots of good details but were not getting much closer to a theme. One day, we all piled into a car and headed down to Disneyland to study the ride up close. We rode the ride dozens of times before park hours frantically scribbling notes and snapping pictures. There is a huge amount of detail in the ride—it is incredibly compelling. We could see that details were going to be very important. But what about the story? Weirdly, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride doesn’t tell a coherent story. It just features several immersive tableaus of pirates doing pirate things. In a sense, this is a real strength: the story is left to the rider’s imagination.

所以,我们从游乐设施中学到了一些好东西,但我们仍然没有主题。我们采访了公园的员工,当公园开放时,我们与游客聊了聊他们对游乐设施的感受。我们得到了很多关于游乐设施外观、它给人的感觉以及他们最喜欢的部分的细节,但这些都没有真正让我们对主题有一个坚实的观点。

So, we learned some good things from riding, but we still didn’t have a theme. We interviewed park employees, and when the park opened, we chatted with guests about their feelings about the ride. We got lots of great details about how the ride looks, how it makes people feel, and what their favorite parts were, but none of it really clued us into a solid point of view for our theme.

在回家的路上,我们坐在车里讨论着观察到的成千上万个细节,有点担心我们仍然没有明确的前进方向。当我们坐下来思考时,几乎不可能不哼唱这首听过无数次的动人主题曲……“哟嗬,哟嗬,海盗的生活对我来说。”突然间,一切都变得清晰了!加勒比海盗游乐设施不是关于海盗的;而是关于成为一名海盗!游乐设施的全部目标是实现抛开社会规则,开始成为一名海盗的幻想!回想起来,这听起来可能很明显,但我们思维的这种转变使一切都具体化了。这不是历史的再现,也不是关于消灭海盗。这是关于实现每个人内心深处的海盗幻想,还有什么比通过沉浸式互动体验来创造这种成为海盗的感觉更好的方法呢?我们现在有了基于体验的主题:成为海盗的幻想。

On the way home in the car, as we talked over the thousands of details we had observed, we fretted a little that we still didn’t have a clear path forward. As we sat and thought, it was almost impossible not to hum the catchy theme song from the ride, having heard it so many times… “Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.” And suddenly it became clear! The Pirates of the Caribbean ride is not about pirates; it is about being a pirate! The whole goal of the ride is to fulfill the fantasy of what it is like to throw aside the rules of society and just start being a pirate! It might sound obvious in retrospect, but this shift in our thinking crystallized everything. This was not a historical recreation, and it was not about destroying pirates. It was about fulfilling the pirate fantasy that everyone has bubbling just below the surface, and what better way to create this feeling of being a pirate than through an immersive, interactive experience? We now had our experience-based theme: the fantasy of being a pirate.

这样,第一步就完成了。我们知道了主题。现在进入第二步,用尽一切可能来强化这个主题。我们确实努力用尽一切办法来做到这一点。以下是一些例子:

And so step one was completed. We knew our theme. Now for step two, use every means possible to reinforce that theme. And we really did work hard to use everything we could to do just that. Some examples include the following:

  • CAVE 形状:过去,我们使用正方形和六边形的 CAVE。我们创建了一个新的四屏 CAVE 形状,更适合海盗船模拟。

  • CAVE shape: In the past, we had used square and hexagonal CAVES. We created a new, four-screen CAVE shape that was better suited to a pirate ship simulation.

  • 立体视觉:并非每个 CAVE 体验都使用立体视觉,但我们选择这样做,因为它们能提供深度感。让你的眼睛聚焦于无限远确实有助于让你感觉自己置身于大海之中。

  • Stereoptics: Not every CAVE experience uses stereoptics, but we chose to do so, because of the sense of depth they give. Letting your eyes focus on infinity really helped make it feel like you were out at sea.

  • 改良的 3D 眼镜:许多现成的影院 3D 眼镜侧面都有遮光罩,以减少观看电影时的干扰。我们知道,人的运动感受其周边视觉的强烈影响,因此这些遮光罩是个问题 — 它们会分散我们的主题,因为玩家无法获得足够的海上航行感。我们与制造商商量,将遮光罩剪掉。

  • Modified 3D glasses: Many off-the-shelf 3D glasses for theaters have blinders on the side to reduce distractions when watching a movie. We knew that a person’s sense of motion is strongly influenced by their peripheral vision, so these blinders were a problem—they were detracting from our theme, since players weren’t getting enough of a sense of sailing at sea. We made arrangements with the manufacturer to have the blinders cut off.

  • 运动平台:我们想营造出摇晃的船的感觉。运动平台似乎是个好主意,但要什么样的呢?最终,我们定制了一个使用气动装置的平台,因为它感觉最像海上的船。

  • Motion platform: We wanted to give the feeling of a rocking, swaying boat. A motion platform seemed like a good idea, but what kind? Eventually, we custom-built a platform using pneumatics, because it felt the most like a ship at sea.

  • 界面:海盗幻想的一部分是驾驶船只,另一部分是发射大炮。我们本可以使用操纵杆或其他现成的硬件,但这不是很好的主题。相反,船只由船舵操纵,我们有真正的金属大炮供玩家瞄准和射击。

  • Interface: Part of the pirate fantasy is steering a ship, and part of it is firing cannons. We could have used joysticks or other off-the-shelf hardware, but that wouldn’t be very good theming. Instead, the ship is steered with a ship’s wheel, and we had real metal cannons that players would use to aim and fire.

  • 视觉效果:我们必须让一切看起来都很漂亮。游乐设施具有一种“超现实”的外观,与我们的主题完美契合。我们使用高端图形硬件和丰富的纹理和模型来实现类似的外观。

  • Visuals: We had to make things look beautiful. The ride features a kind of “hyperreal” look, which fits perfectly with our theme. We used high-end graphics hardware and rich textures and models to achieve a similar look.

  • 音乐:经过一番努力,我们终于获得了使用游乐设施音乐的许可。音乐完美地诠释了主题,并以强烈的怀旧感将游戏与游乐设施联系起来。

  • Music: Through some pains, we got permission to use the music from the ride. It captures the theme so well and connects the game to the ride, in a powerful nostalgic way.

  • 音频:我们的音响设计师创建了一个定制的十扬声器音响系统,可以播放来自各个方向的声音,让您感觉仿佛置身于大海之中。有些扬声器专门设计用于播放炮声,并且放置在与船的距离恰到好处的位置,这样波形就会在您的胃中坍塌,因此您不仅会听到炮声,还会感觉到炮声。

  • Audio: Our sound designers created a custom ten-speaker sound system that could play sounds from all directions, making you feel like you were out at sea. Some of the speakers were designed only to play cannon blasts and were placed at precisely the right distance from the boat so that the waveform would collapse in your stomach, so you would not just hear but feel the cannons firing.

  • 自由的感觉:海盗就是自由。我们的游戏机制旨在让玩家随心所欲地航行,同时确保玩家玩得开心。如何实现这一点的细节将在第 18 章间接控制”中详细讨论。

  • A feeling of freedom: Piracy is all about freedom. Our gameplay mechanics were designed to let players sail wherever they chose but at the same time ensure the players have an exciting time. Details of how this was accomplished will be discussed in detail in Chapter 18: Indirect Control.

  • 死人不会说话:如何处理游戏中的死亡是一个真正的问题。有人主张这是一款电子游戏,我们应该像传统的电子游戏那样处理它:如果你死了,会有一些惩罚,然后你就会复活,再次玩游戏。这与我们“海盗生活”的主题不太相符幻想——在幻想中,你不会死,或者如果你死了,也会以一种非常戏剧性的方式死去,而且你不会再回来。此外,我们非常努力地为这五分钟的体验保持戏剧性的兴趣曲线(第16 章中有解释),因为戏剧性是海盗幻想的一部分。如果玩家在游戏中途突然死亡,那就破坏了这一点。我们的解决方案是让玩家在游戏的大部分时间里都刀枪不入,但如果他们在体验过程中受到太多打击,他们的船就会在最后一场战斗结束时戏剧性地沉没。这打破了电子游戏的传统,但主题比传统更重要。

  • Dead men tell no tales: How to handle death in the game was a real question. Some advocated that this was a videogame, and we should handle it like video-games traditionally do: if you die, there is some penalty, and then you come back to life, to play again. This didn’t fit in well with our theme of living the pirate fantasy—in the fantasy, you don’t die, or if you do, it is in an incredibly dramatic way, and you do not return. Further, we were trying very hard to maintain a dramatic interest curve (explained in Chapter 16) for our five-minute experience, since drama is part of the pirate fantasy. If the players could suddenly die in the middle of the game, it would spoil that. Our solution was to make players invulnerable throughout the majority of the game, but if they took too many hits over the course of the experience, their ship would sink dramatically at the end of the final battle. This broke with videogame tradition, but theme is more important than tradition.

  • 宝藏:收集大量宝藏是海盗幻想中必不可少的一部分。不幸的是,在电子游戏中,成堆的金币实际上很难令人信服地呈现出来。我们想出了一种特殊的技术,让扁平的手绘宝藏看起来像是摆放在船甲板上的立体物体。

  • Treasure: Collecting vast hordes of treasure is an essential part of the pirate fantasy. Unfortunately, piles of gold are actually pretty hard to render convincingly in a videogame. We came up with a special technique that made flat, hand-painted treasures seem to be solid, dimensional objects that sat prominently on the ship’s deck.

  • 灯光:我们需要照亮玩家所在的房间。我们该如何设计主题?我们在灯光上使用了特殊的滤镜,让它看起来像是水面反射的光线。

  • Lighting: We needed to light the room the players stood in. How could we theme that? We used special filters on the light that made it look like it was light reflected off of water.

  • 放东西的地方:站在控制台前的人需要放包、钱包等东西的地方。我们本来可以做一个架子。但是,我们用渔网做了一些包,看起来就像是船上的东西。

  • A place for my stuff: People who step up to the controls need a place to put their bags, purses, etc. We could have just made a shelf. Instead, we created bags out of fishing nets that really look like they belong on a boat.

  • 空调:游戏所在建筑的设施负责人问我们是否关心房间空调通风口的位置。我们的第一个想法是“谁在乎?”但后来我们想,“我们如何利用这一点来强化我们的主题?”通风口位于船的前部,向后吹,因此玩家在驾驶船时会感到微风。

  • Air conditioning: The people in charge of facilities in the building where the game was going to go asked if we cared where the air conditioning vents in the room were placed. Our first thought was “who cares?” But then we thought, “How can we use this to reinforce our theme?” The vents were placed at the front of the ship, blowing back, so players feel a breeze as they sail their ship.

  • 蓝胡子的眼睛:有一件事我们一直没搞清楚如何为 3D 眼镜添加主题。我们尝试让它们看起来像海盗帽和头巾,但效果并不理想。一位机智的绅士建议应该强迫玩家戴上眼罩,这样 3D 效果就没有必要了。最后,我们放弃了,让这个细节不再成为主题。令我们惊讶的是,当游戏在迪士尼世界安装好,我们去尝试时,准备带我们上船的演员宣布:“上船前,必须戴上蓝胡子的眼睛。”这很令人惊讶,因为这不是给演员的“官方剧本”。游乐设施服务员成功了,而我们却失败了。这是一种简单有效的主题化方法,我们忽略了细节,并且有力地说明了当你有一个强大的统一主题时,团队中的每个人都更容易做出有用的贡献。

  • The eyes of Bluebeard: One thing we never figured out how to theme was the 3D glasses. We experimented with making them look like pirate hats and bandanas, but it didn’t really work. One witty gentleman suggested that players should be forced to wear eye patches, so the 3D effect was unnecessary. In the end, we gave up and let that detail go unthemed. To our surprise, when the game had been installed at Disney World and we went to try it out, the cast member who was about to lead us on board proclaimed, “Before ye board, ye must wear the Eyes of Bluebeard.” This was surprising, because it was not in the “official script” given to cast members. The ride attendants succeeded where we had failed. It was a simple and effective way to theme a detail that escaped us and a powerful illustration that when you have a strong unifying theme, it makes it easier for everyone on the team to make useful contributions.

这不是一份完整的清单。我们所做的一切和做出的每个决定都集中在它是否能强化主题并提供我们想要传达的基本体验上。你可能会说,如果没有大笔预算,你就负担不起花哨的主题。但许多主题细节实际上相当便宜。它们可以是一行文字、一种颜色选择或一种音效。主题设计很有趣——一旦你养成了让尽可能多的东西符合主题的习惯,就很难停下来。但你为什么要停下来呢?这给了我们镜头 #11

This is not a complete list. Everything we did and every decision we made were focused on whether it would reinforce the theme and deliver the essential experience we wanted to get across. You might argue that without a big budget, you can’t afford to do fancy theming. But many theming details are really quite inexpensive. They can be a line of text, or a color choice, or a sound effect. And theming is fun—once you get in the habit of trying to make as many things as possible fit your theme, it’s hard to stop. But why would you stop? And this gives us Lens #11.

谐振

Resonance

统一的主题很好——它能让你的设计专注于一个目标。但有些主题比其他主题更好。最好的主题是那些能引起玩家共鸣的主题——能深深打动玩家的主题。“当海盗的幻想”主题之所以强大,是因为这是每个人——孩子、成年人、男人和女人——都曾有过的幻想。从某种意义上说,它与我们渴望自由的愿望产生了共鸣——摆脱我们的义务,摆脱我们的忧虑和烦恼,自由地做我们想做的事,想什么时候做就什么时候做。

A unifying theme is good—it focuses your design toward a single goal. But some themes are better than others. The best themes are ones that resonate with players—themes that touch players deeply. The “fantasy of being a pirate” theme is powerful because it is a fantasy that everyone—kids, adults, men, and women—has had at one time or another. In a sense, it resonates with our desire to be free—free from our obligations, free from our worries and cares, free to do what we want, when we want to.

当你设法挖掘出这些能引起共鸣的主题之一时,你就拥有了深刻而强大的东西,它能够真正打动人们,并为他们带来超越和变革的体验。前面我们讨论过,有些主题是基于体验的,也就是说,它们都是为了提供某种基本体验。当这种体验与玩家的幻想和愿望产生共鸣时,这种体验很快就会对他们产生重要影响。但还有另一种主题可以像基于体验的主题一样引起共鸣,有时甚至更甚。这就是基于真相的主题。

When you manage to tap into one of these resonant themes, you have something deep and powerful that has a true ability to move people and to give them an experience that is both transcendent and transforming. Earlier we discussed that some themes are experience based, that is, they are all about delivering a certain essential experience. When this experience is one that resonates with the fantasies and desires of your players, it will be an experience that quickly becomes important to them. But there is another kind of theme that can be just as resonant as an experience-based theme, sometimes more so. This is the truth-based theme.

以电影《泰坦尼克号》为例。这部电影深深打动了全世界的观众。为什么?当然,这部电影的制作精良,特效也很棒,还有一个甜蜜(尽管有时有些伤感)的爱情故事,但很多电影都有这些东西。这部电影的特别之处在于它有一个深刻而引起共鸣的主题,并通过电影的每一个元素得到了强化。那么,主题是什么呢?一开始,你可能会说主题是泰坦尼克号本身及其悲惨的事故。这是电影的重要组成部分。事实上,你可以说这是电影的主题,但不是主要主题。主要主题不是基于经验的。相反,它是一个简单的陈述,我会将其表述为“爱比生命更重要,比死亡更强大”。这是一个强有力的陈述。但这是我们许多人打心底里深信不疑的陈述。这当然不是一个科学真理,但对许多人来说,这是一个深深持有但很少表达的个人真理。

Consider the movie Titanic. This film deeply moved audiences the world over. Why? Sure, it was well executed, and it had great special effects and a sweet (though sometimes schmaltzy) love story, but lots of movies have those things. What was special here was a deep and resonant theme reinforced by every element of the film. So, what was the theme? At first, you might say that the theme was the Titanic itself and its tragic accident. And that is an important component of the movie. In fact, you could argue that it is a theme of the movie, but it is not the main theme. The main theme is not experience based. Instead, it is a simple statement, which I would phrase as something like “love is more important than life and stronger than death.” This is a powerful statement. But it is a statement that many of us believe deeply in our heart of hearts. It is certainly not a scientific truth, but for many, it is a deeply held, though rarely expressed, personal truth.

许多好莱坞业内人士不相信这部电影会成功:观众会知道结局。但是,除了在一个我们知道几乎每个人都会死的地方,还有什么地方能更好地讲述一个符合这个强大主题的故事呢?昂贵的特效并非毫无意义——要完全理解这个主题的重要性,我们必须感觉一切都是真实的,就像我们就在那里,就像我们自己正在死去。

Many Hollywood insiders did not believe this movie could possibly be successful: audiences would know the ending. But where better to tell a story that fits this powerful theme than in a place where we know almost everyone is going to die? The expensive special effects were not gratuitous—to fully grasp the import of this theme, we must feel like it is all real, like we are right there, like we are dying ourselves.

基于事实的主题有时很难发现。这些深层事实的力量部分在于它们是隐藏的。通常,设计师甚至可能没有意识到他们选择了某个主题,或者无法用语言表达它——他们只是对体验应该如何有一定的感觉。但值得花点时间去探索你对这些事情的感受,直到你可以具体地表达你的主题。这将使你更容易决定什么应该和不应该进入你的游戏,也使你更容易向团队中的其他人解释这些决定的理由。当斯蒂芬·金在写他著名的小说《魔女嘉莉》时,直到他写第二稿时,他才意识到这是一部关于血的小说,不仅仅是恐怖电影里的血,而是对血的多种含义的探索,从受伤到家庭关系,再到成长。意识到这一点后,他看到了很多调整和加强故事的机会。

Truth-based themes can sometimes be hard to spot. Part of the power of these deep truths is that they are hidden. Often, a designer might not even consciously know they have chosen a particular theme or be able to express it verbally—they just have a certain feeling about how the experience should be. But it is worth the trouble to explore your feelings about these things to the point that you can express your theme concretely. It will make it much easier for you to decide what should and shouldn’t go into your game and make it easier for you to explain the rationale of these decisions to others in your team. When Stephen King was writing his famous novel Carrie, it was not until he was working on the second draft that he realized that this was a novel about blood, not just horror movie blood, but an exploration of the many meanings of blood, from injury, to family ties, to coming of age. And realizing this, he saw many opportunities to tune and strengthen the story.

Rob Daviau 的迷人棋盘游戏《Risk: Legacy》就是一个以事实为本的主题的绝佳例子。在这个不同寻常的游戏中,Daviau 做了棋盘游戏世界中前所未有的事情——他创造了游戏机制,玩家在玩游戏时所做的选择会永久改变游戏。游戏规则要求玩家使用不可移除的贴纸修改棋盘,用永久性记号笔在棋盘上书写以占领领地,撕毁并丢弃游戏卡,甚至对游戏规则书进行永久修改。这些不同寻常的游戏机制新颖有趣,但更重要的是,它们强化了游戏的中心主题:“战争改变世界”。

An excellent example of a truth-based theme can be seen in Rob Daviau’s fascinating board game Risk: Legacy. In this unusual game, Daviau did something never before attempted in the world of board games—he created game mechanics such that when you play, choices you make change the game permanently, for all time. The rules insist you modify the board with irremovable stickers, write on the board in permanent marker to claim territories, rip up and discard game cards, and even make permanent modifications to the game rulebook. These unusual game mechanics are novel and intriguing, but more importantly, they reinforce the game’s central theme: “war changes a world.”

另一个基于事实的主题的例子是赫拉克勒斯的故事。VR Studio 团队被要求根据迪士尼版本的古代赫拉克勒斯神话制作一款游戏。当一个故事像这个故事一样,千百年来一直流传、不断被讲述,这是一个很好的线索,表明其中隐藏着一个基于事实的主题。当然,赫拉克勒斯是一个强壮的男人,但这似乎还不够重要,不足以引起人们如此深刻的共鸣。我们研究了各种版本的故事。有趣的是,即使在古代,也没有一个经典的传说。有时赫拉克勒斯有十项功绩,有时有十二项,有时有二十项。但故事的某些方面总是一样的。在每个故事中,赫拉克勒斯都是一个有德行的人,他战胜了死亡。这是一个深刻的真理,是许多宗教的核心:如果你足够有德行,你就能战胜死亡。迪士尼动画师在赫拉克勒斯与冥王哈迪斯的冲突中体现了这一主题。我们在游戏中延续了这个主题,让它主要发生在冥界,直到最后,当你胜利地闯入人间,与哈迪斯进行最后的空战时。游戏中也有子主题,比如关于团队合作重要性的主题,但最终,我们将这些子主题置于主主题的服务中。

Another example of a truth-based theme is the Hercules story. The VR Studio team was asked to create a game based upon Disney’s version of the ancient Hercules myth. When a story stays alive, told, and retold, for thousands of years like this story has, it is a pretty good clue that there is a truth-based theme hiding inside it. Sure, Hercules was a strong man, but that doesn’t seem quite important enough that it would so deeply resonate with people. We looked at the various versions of the story. Interestingly, there was not one canonical telling, even in ancient times. Sometimes Hercules had ten labors, sometimes twelve, and sometimes twenty. But there were certain aspects of the story that were always the same. In every story, Hercules is a man so virtuous that he defeats death. And this is a truth so deep that it is at the heart of many religions: if you are virtuous enough, you can defeat death. The Disney animators embodied this theme in Hercules’ conflict with Hades, Lord of the Underworld. We continued this theme in our game, by having it take place mostly in the Underworld, until the end, when you triumphantly break through to the world of the living for a final aerial battle against Hades. There were subthemes too, such as a theme about the importance of teamwork, but ultimately, we placed these subthemes in the service of the main theme.

有时,你需要一点一点地摸索出主题。这是另一个迪士尼故事:当我们开始制作Toontown Online项目(迪士尼的第一款大型多人游戏)时,我们再次不确定我们的主题。我们已经对Toontown做了功课,研究了《谁陷害了兔子罗杰?》电影和迪士尼乐园的Toontown部分。奇怪的是, Toontown在这两个地方都没有得到很好的定义。不过,我们可以看到Toontown很强大。它定义不明确的原因是每个人似乎都已经知道它是什么——好像他们一直都知道卡通人物不在屏幕上时有一个特殊的地方生活。这个(有点令人毛骨悚然的)事实让我们觉得我们正在挖掘一些基本的和隐藏的东西。我们开始列出我们认为Toontown似乎是关于什么的清单。有三个大点脱颖而出:

Sometimes you figure out your theme a piece at a time. Here’s another Disney story: when we started work on the Toontown Online project (Disney’s first massively multiplayer game), we were again unsure of our theme. We had done our homework on Toontown, studying both the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? movie and the Toontown section of Disneyland. Curiously, Toontown was not well defined in either place. We could see Toontown was powerful, though. The reason it was so ill defined was that everyone seemed to already have a sense of what it was—as if they had known all along that there was a special place where cartoon characters lived when they weren’t on the screen. This (slightly creepy) fact gave us a sense we were tapping into something fundamental and hidden. We started making lists of things we thought Toontown seemed to be about. Three big ones stood out:

  1. 和朋友一起玩得开心

  2. Having fun with your friends

  3. 逃避现实

  4. Escaping from reality

  5. 简单与超越

  6. Simplicity and transcendence

第一个非常适合在线联网游戏,我们喜欢这一点。第二个很有道理——卡通片是一种很好的逃避现实的方式。第三个(我们将在第19 章世界中更详细地探讨)基本上是这样的理念:卡通城里的事情比现实世界中简单,但你在卡通城中也比在现实世界中更强大。

The first one lent itself really well to online networked play, and we liked that. The second one made a lot of sense—cartoons are a good form of escapism. The third one (which we’ll be exploring in more detail in Chapter 19: Worlds) is basically the idea that things are simpler in Toontown than they are in the real world, but you are also more powerful in Toontown than you are in the real world.

所有这些都有助于明确我们想在游戏中看到什么,但都没有真正确立一个明确的主题。这些更像是子主题。在某个时候,我们意识到这三件事结合在一起强烈地描述了我们在第4 章详细讨论过的东西:游戏。游戏是关于与朋友一起玩乐和逃避现实,游戏世界比现实世界更简单,但你拥有更多的权力。但我们并不觉得游戏本身是一个强大的主题。我们需要一些更有吸引力、更有冲突的东西。这让我们想到了游戏的天敌:工作。然后很明显——“工作与娱乐”将是一个非常强大的主题。更详细地说,“工作想要摧毁游戏,但游戏必须生存”是我们得出的基于事实的主题。像我们在第4 章中所做的那样,用“奴隶制”和“自由”代替“工作”和“娱乐”,这个主题的力量一切都变得清晰起来。这感觉真的很对。我们想制作一款孩子和父母可以一起玩的游戏,主题是他们都能理解的——还有什么比以好玩的方式探索他们生活中的主要冲突之一更好的方法呢?所以我们就这么做了。Toontown Online的故事变成了机器人高管(齿轮)试图将色彩缤纷的Toontown变成一个肮脏的办公园区的故事。Toons 联手用恶作剧和恶作剧击退了齿轮,而齿轮则用办公用品进行了反击。这个故事很奇怪,引起了公司内部的一些人的关注,但我们相信它会成功,因为它表达了一个我们知道会引起观众共鸣的主题。

All of this helped clarify what we wanted to see in the game, but none of it really established a clear theme. These felt more like subthemes. At some point, we realized that these three things together strongly characterize something that back in Chapter 4 we discussed in detail: play. Play is about having fun with your friends and escaping from reality, and a play world is simpler than the real world, but you have much more power. But we didn’t feel like play was a powerful theme on its own. We needed something with more bite, with more conflict. This led us to play’s natural opponent: work. And then it was clear—“work vs. play” would be a very strong theme. Stated in more detail, “work wants to destroy play, but play must survive” was the truth-based theme we arrived at. Replace “work” and “play” with “slavery” and “freedom” as we did in Chapter 4, and the power of this theme becomes clear. It really felt right. We wanted to create a game that kids and parents could play together, with a theme they could both relate to—how better to do that than by playfully exploring one of the primary conflicts in their lives? And so we did. The story of Toontown Online became a story of robot executives (the Cogs) trying to turn colorful Toontown into a dingy office park. The Toons team up to fight off the Cogs with gags and practical jokes, and the Cogs fight back with office supplies. This story was strange enough that it raised some eyebrows inside the company, but we were confident it would work because it was an expression of a theme that we knew would resonate with our audience.

共鸣主题能将您的作品从手工艺提升为艺术品。艺术家会带您去往您独自无法到达的地方,而主题则是到达那里的载体。当然,并非每个主题都需要是共鸣主题。但是,当您找到深刻的共鸣主题时,充分利用它是有意义的。有些主题基于经验,而另一些主题则基于事实。您永远无法仅通过逻辑判断哪些主题是共鸣的——您必须在内心深处感受到共鸣。这是自我倾听的重要形式,也是镜头 #12

Resonant themes elevate your work from craft to art. An artist is someone who takes you where you could never go alone, and a theme is the vehicle for getting there. Not every theme needs to be a resonant theme, of course. But when you find a deep resonant theme, it makes sense to use it for all it is worth. Some will be experience based, while others will be truth based. You can never tell which themes are resonant just through logic—you have to feel the resonance, deep inside yourself. It is an important form of self-listening and is also Lens #12.

回到现实

Back to Reality

您可能认为,所有这些关于共鸣主题的讨论对于游戏设计来说都太高深了。对于某些游戏来说,也许确实如此。《愤怒的小鸟》有深刻的共鸣主题吗?也许没有,但它确实有一个有助于推动设计的统一主题。共鸣主题可以为您的作品增添巨大的力量,但即使您的游戏似乎没有这样的主题,它仍然会通过统一的主题得到加强,以集中体验。

You may think that all this talk of resonant themes is too lofty for game design. And for some games, maybe it is. Does Angry Birds have a deep resonant theme? Maybe not, but it certainly does have a unifying theme that helped to drive the design. Resonant themes can add great power to your work, but even if your game doesn’t seem to have one, it will still be strengthened by a unifying theme to focus the experience.

有些设计师拒绝主题的概念,因为他们说“玩家永远不会注意到”。玩家确实无法清楚地说出真正打动他们的作品的主题——这是因为主题通常在潜意识层面起作用。玩家知道他们喜欢一款游戏,但他们说不出为什么。通常,原因是所有元素都在强化一个对他们来说有趣或重要的主题。主题不是设计师想要传达秘密信息的基于谜题的象征意义。主题是将你的工作重点放在对玩家有意义的事情上。

Some designers reject the notion of theme, because they say, “the players will never notice.” And it is certainly true that the players cannot always state clearly the theme of a work that truly moves them—and that is because theme often operates at a subconscious level. Players know they like a game, but they can’t quite say why. Often, the reason is that all of the elements are reinforcing a theme that is interesting or important to them. Theme is not about some puzzle-based symbolism where the designer intends a secret message. Theme is about focusing your work toward something that holds meaning for your players.

不同的设计师在设计过程中以不同的方式使用主题。现在是时候让我们探索游戏设计整体流程的许多其他方面了。

Different designers use theme in different ways as part of their design process. Now it is time for us to explore the many other aspects of the overall process of game design.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • Rich Gold 的《Plenitude》。主题只是任天堂 Power Glove 设计师智慧宝库中的众多主题之一。

  • The Plenitude by Rich Gold. Theming is just one of the many topics in this treasure trove of wisdom by the designer of the Nintendo Power Glove.

第七

CHAPTER SEVEN

游戏始于一个想法

The Game Begins with an Idea



7.1

FIGURE

7.1

希望这本书能激励你尝试设计一些自己的游戏。当你这样做时(也许你已经这样做了),你可能会认为你没有用正确的方法去做,没有使用“真正的”游戏设计师使用的方法。我猜你设计游戏的方法可能是这样的:

Hopefully, this book will inspire you to try designing some games of your own. When you do that (maybe you have already), you might be thinking that you aren’t going about it the right way, not using the methods that “real” game designers use. I’m guessing the method you used to design your games was something like:

  1. 想一个主意。

  2. Think of an idea.

  3. 试试看。

  4. Try it out.

  5. 继续修改和测试,直到看起来足够好为止。

  6. Keep changing it and testing it until it seems good enough.

这听起来有点业余。好吧,猜猜怎么着?这正是真正的游戏设计师所做的。本章本应到此结束,但有些方法比其他方法更好。你已经知道该怎么做了。在本章和下一章中,我们将讨论如何尽可能地做到这一点。

Which sounds kind of amateurish. Well, guess what? That is exactly what real game designers do. And this chapter would end here, except for the fact that some ways to do these things are better than others. You already know what to do. In this chapter and the next, we are going to discuss how to do it as well as possible.

灵感

Inspiration

正如我之前提到的,我曾做过几年职业杂耍演员。大约十四岁的时候,我只会两种杂耍,于是我参加了我的第一个杂耍节。如果你还没有参加过,那你一定会觉得很壮观——他们主要由各种技能和能力水平的杂耍演员组成,他们站在一个大型体育馆里,讨论、试验和分享新技术。这是一个你可以尝试不可能的事情,然后毫无羞愧地放弃的地方。但我第一次独自参加,感觉并不那么紧张。我非常紧张——毕竟,我不是“真正的”杂耍演员。我大部分时间都睁大眼睛,双手插在口袋里,四处走动,害怕有人会指着我大喊:“嘿!他在这儿干什么?”但当然,那并没有发生。节日里的每个人都和我一样学会了——他们是自学的。等我适应了之后,我就害羞地拿出我的豆袋,自己练习了一下。我看着别人表演杂耍,也试着模仿他们——有时我能做到。但当我环顾四周寻找更多技巧来尝试时,有一位杂耍艺人脱颖而出。他是一位身穿粉蓝色连体衣的老人,他的杂耍技巧与众不同。他使用的模式和节奏很独特,他的杂耍技巧虽然难度不大,但看起来非常美妙。我看了很长时间才意识到,他表演的一些技巧在当时看起来非常特别和独特,而这些技巧我早就会做了——但当他表演这些技巧时,它们的风格和感觉完全不同,看起来像是全新的东西。我看了他大约二十分钟,突然他看着我说:“怎么样?”

As I mentioned earlier, I worked for several years as a professional juggler. When I was about fourteen years old, and my repertoire of tricks was limited to two, I attended my first juggling festival. If you haven’t attended one, they are remarkable to see—they mainly consist of jugglers of all levels of skill and ability standing around in a large gymnasium, talking about, experimenting with, and sharing new techniques. It is a place where you can attempt the impossible and drop without shame. But attending alone, my first time, it didn’t feel that way. I was incredibly nervous—after all, I wasn’t a “real” juggler. I mostly walked around, eyes wide, hands in my pockets, terrified that someone would point and shout, “Hey! What’s HE doing here?” But of course, that didn’t happen. Everyone at the festival had learned just like I had—they had taught themselves. Once I grew comfortable, I shyly took out my beanbags and did a little practicing of my own. I watched other people do tricks, and I tried imitating them—sometimes I could do it. But as I looked around for more examples of techniques to try, there was one juggler who stood out from the rest. He was an old man in a powder blue jumpsuit, and his tricks were not like the others at all. He used patterns and rhythms that were unique, and his tricks, though not astonishing in their difficulty, were simply beautiful to watch. I had to watch a long time before I realized that some of the tricks that seemed so special and unique when he did them were things I could already do—but when he did them, they had such a different style, a different feeling, that they seemed like something completely new. I watched him for about twenty minutes, and suddenly he looked at me and said, “Well?”

  • “嗯,什么?”我有点尴尬地说道。

  • “Well, what?” I said, kind of embarrassed.

  • “你不想模仿我吗?”

  • “Aren’t you going to try to copy me?”

  • “我——我想我不会知道怎么做。”我结结巴巴地说。

  • “I—I don’t think I would know how,” I stammered out.

  • 他笑道:“是啊,他们永远都做不到。知道为什么我的技巧看起来如此不同吗?”

  • He laughed. “Yeah, they never can. Know why my tricks look so different?”

  • “呃,练习?”我设法说道。

  • “Uh, practice?” I managed.

  • “不——每个人都在练习。看看周围!他们都在练习。不,我的技巧看起来不同,因为我从哪里学来的。这些家伙的技巧都是从彼此那里学来的。这很好——你可以从中学到很多东西。但这永远不会让你脱颖而出。”

  • “No—everybody practices. Look around! They’re all practicing. No, my tricks look different because of where I get them. These guys, they get their tricks from each other. Which is fine—you can learn a lot that way. But it will never make you stand out.”

  • 我想了想。“那么你从哪里得到它们?”我问。“书?”

  • I thought about it. “So where do you get them?” I asked. “Books?”

  • “哈!书。这个不错。不,不是书。你想知道这个秘密吗?”

  • “Ha! Books. That’s a good one. No, not books. You wanna know the secret?”

  • “当然。”

  • “Sure.”

“秘诀是:不要向其他杂耍演员寻求灵感——要从其他地方寻找。”他继续做一个漂亮的循环动作,他的手臂呈螺旋状,偶尔会旋转。 “这个动作是我在纽约看芭蕾舞时学到的。还有这个……”他做了一个动作,球在他的手来回轻柔地摆动时上下弹跳。 “我从缅因州的一个湖上看到一群鹅起飞时学到的。还有这个,”他做了一个奇怪的机械动作,球几乎以直角移动。 “我从长岛的打孔机上学到的。”他笑了笑,停了一会儿。 “人们试图模仿这些动作,但他们做不到。他们总是尝试……是的,看看那边的那个家伙!”他指着体育馆对面一个留着长马尾辫的杂耍演员,他正在做“芭蕾舞”动作。但它看起来很蠢。缺了点什么,但我不知道是什么。

“The secret is: don’t look to other jugglers for inspiration—look everywhere else.” He proceeded to do a beautiful looping pattern, where his arms kind of spiraled, and he turned occasional pirouettes. “I learned that one watching a ballet in New York. And this one…” he did a move that involved the balls popping up and down as his hands fluttered delicately back and forth. “I learned that from a flock of geese I saw take off from a lake up in Maine. And this,” he did a weird mechanical looking movement where the balls almost appeared to move at right angles. “I learned that from a paper punch machine on Long Island.” He laughed a little and stopped juggling for a minute. “People try to copy these moves, but they can’t. They always try… yeah, look at that fella, over there!” He pointed to a juggler with a long ponytail across the gym who was doing the “ballet” move. But it just looked dumb. Something was missing, but I couldn’t say what.

“你看,这些人可以模仿我的动作,但他们模仿不了我的灵感。”他玩杂耍的图案让我想起了螺旋形的双螺旋。就在这时,扩音器宣布初学者研讨会开始——我向他道谢后跑开了。我再也没见过他,但我从未忘记过他。我希望知道他的名字,因为他的建议永远改变了我对创造力的态度。

“See, these guys can copy my moves, but they can’t copy my inspiration.” He juggled a pattern that made me think of a spiraling double helix. Just then, the PA announced a beginner’s workshop—I thanked him and ran off. I didn’t see him again, but I never forgot him. I wish I knew his name, because his advice changed my approach to creativity forever.

设计师 Chris Klug 鼓励所有设计师找到一种关键的情感体验来构建游戏,他称之为“艺术指导的情感核心”。其他人也支持这一观点。四名研究生(Kyle Gabler、Kyle Gray、Matt Kucic 和 Shalin Shodhan)承诺在一个学期内制作 50 款电子游戏,并在出色的论文《如何在 7 天内制作游戏原型》中写下了他们学到的东西。以下是摘录:

Designer Chris Klug encourages all designers to find one key emotional experience to build your game around, which he calls “the emotional heart of art direction.” This notion is backed up by others. Four graduate students (Kyle Gabler, Kyle Gray, Matt Kucic, and Shalin Shodhan) undertook to create fifty videogames in a single semester and wrote about what they learned in the excellent essay “How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days.” The following is an excerpt:

除了头脑风暴,我们发现收集具有个人意义的艺术作品和音乐特别有成效。人们评论说,许多游戏,如“Gravity Head”或“On a Rainy Day”,营造出强烈的氛围,具有强烈的情感吸引力。这并非偶然。在这些和许多其他情况下,配乐和初始艺术创造了一种综合的感觉,推动了大部分游戏决策、故事和最终艺术。

Gabler 先生:“《Tower of Goo》的创作灵感来源于我回家路上听阿斯托尔·皮亚佐拉的《Tango Apasionado》的开头时(出于某种原因),脑海中浮现出一个细雨蒙蒙的景象:日落时分,小镇上每个人都走出家门,搬出椅子、桌子和任何他们能搬的东西,在市中心建造一座巨大的塔楼。我不知道具体原因,但他们想不断向上攀爬——但他们不是很好的土木工程师,所以你必须帮助他们。最终的原型有点欢快,我用皮亚佐拉更欢快的《Libertango》取代了最终的音乐,但这是一个最初的情感目标基本上写出了整个游戏的例子。”

As an alternative to brainstorming, we found that gathering art and music with some personal significance was particularly fruitful. People have commented that many of the games like “Gravity Head” or “On a Rainy Day” create a strong mood and have strong emotional appeal. It’s no accident. In these and many other cases, the soundtrack and initial art created a combined feeling that drove much of the gameplay decisions, story, and final art.

Mr. Gabler: “The idea behind ‘Tower of Goo’ came up while I was listening to (for some reason) the opening to Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Tango Apasionado’ after walking home, and had this drizzly vision of a town at sunset where everyone was leaving their houses, carrying out chairs, tables, and anything they could to build a giant tower in the center of their city. I didn’t know why exactly, but they wanted to climb up and up and up - but they weren’t very good civil engineers so you had to help them. The final prototype ended up a little more cheery, and I replaced the final music with Piazzolla’s more upbeat ‘Libertango,’ but here’s a case where an initial emotional target basically wrote the entire game.”

灵感是优秀游戏背后的秘密之一。但如何将灵感转化为优秀的游戏设计呢?

Inspiration is one of the secrets behind the strongest games. But how can you turn inspiration into a great game design?

第一步是承认你有问题。

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

陈述问题

State the Problem

不要爱上你的解决方案。要爱上你的问题。

-匿名的

Don’t fall in love with your solution. Fall in love with your problem.

—Anonymous

设计的目的是解决问题,游戏设计也不例外。在开始提出想法之前,你需要确定你为什么要这样做,问题陈述是一种清晰地陈述这一点的方式。好的问题陈述既能说明你的目标,也能说明你的限制。例如,你的初始问题陈述可能是:

The purpose of design is to solve problems, and game design is no exception. Before you start coming up with ideas, you need to be certain of why you are doing it, and a problem statement is a way to state that clearly. Good problem statements tell both your goal and your constraints. For example, your initial problem statement might be:

“我怎样才能制作一款青少年真正喜欢的页游呢?”

“How can I make a browser-based game that teenagers will really like?”

这既明确了你的目标(青少年会真正喜欢的东西),也明确了你的限制(它必须是基于浏览器的游戏)。如此清晰地陈述事情的一个好处是,它能让你意识到你可能错误地过度限制了真正的问题。也许你一直在考虑“基于浏览器的游戏”,但实际上,你创造的东西根本没有理由必须是游戏——也许某种基于浏览器的玩具或活动只要青少年真的喜欢就行。所以,你可以用更广泛的术语重新陈述你的问题:

This makes clear both your goal (something teenagers will really like) and your constraints (it must be a browser-based game). One advantage of stating things so clearly is that it can make you realize that you might be mistakenly overconstraining the real problem. Maybe you’ve been thinking “browser-based game,” but really, there is no reason that what you create has to be a game at all—maybe some kind of browser-based toy or activity would be okay as long as teenagers really like it. So, you might restate your problem in broader terms:

“我怎样才能创造青少年真正喜欢的基于浏览器的体验?”

“How can I make a browser-based experience that teenagers really like?”

正确陈述问题至关重要——如果你陈述得太宽泛,你可能会想出不符合你真正目标的设计,如果你陈述得太狭窄(因为你关注的是解决方案而不是问题),你可能会与一些聪明的解决方案隔绝,因为你认为某种解决方案是解决你问题的唯一有效方法。想出解决方案的人提出巧妙解决方案的人几乎总是花时间找出真正问题的人。爱上你的解决方案是一种危险的诱惑——为什么不考虑爱上你的问题呢?

It is crucial that you get the problem statement right—if you make it too broad, you might come up with designs that don’t meet your true goal, and if you make it too narrow (because you were focusing on solutions instead of the problem), you might cut yourself off from some clever solutions because you assumed that a certain kind of solution was the only valid one for your problem. People who come up with clever solutions are almost always the same people who take the time to figure out the real problem. It’s a dangerous temptation to fall in love with your solution—why not consider falling in love with your problem, instead?

清楚地陈述你的问题有三个好处:

There are three advantages of clearly stating your problem:

  1. 更广阔的创意空间。大多数人都太快地跳到解决方案并在那里开始他们的创作过程。如果你从问题而不是提议的解决方案开始你的创作过程,你将能够探索更广阔的创意空间并找到隐藏在别人看不到的地方的解决方案。

  2. Broader creative space. Most people jump to solutions too fast and start their creative process there. If you start your process at the problem instead of at a proposed solution, you will be able to explore a broader creative space and find solutions that are hiding where no one else is looking.

  3. 明确的衡量标准。你对所提建议的质量有一个明确的衡量标准:它们解决问题的效果如何?

  4. Clear measurement. You have a clear measurement of the quality of proposed ideas: How well do they solve the problem?

  5. 更好的沟通。当你与团队一起设计时,如果问题已经明确陈述,沟通就会容易得多。很多时候,如果问题没有明确陈述,合作者会试图解决完全不同的问题,却没有意识到这一点。

  6. Better communication. When you are designing with a team, communication is much easier if the problem has been clearly stated. Very often, collaborators will be trying to solve quite different problems and not realize it if the problem has not been clearly stated.

有时,在你意识到问题“真正”是什么之前,你可能已经探索了几个想法。没关系!只要确保一旦你明白了问题是什么,就回去重新清楚地陈述问题。

Sometimes, you will have already explored several ideas before you realize what the problem “really” is. That’s fine! Just make sure you go back and restate the problem clearly, once you see what it is.

完整的游戏设计将涵盖元素四元组的所有四个元素:技术、机制、故事和美学。通常,您的问题陈述会限制您对四个元素中的一个(或多个)做出一些既定决定,并且您必须从那里开始构建。当您尝试陈述问题时,从四元组的角度检查它很有用,以检查您在哪里有设计自由,在哪里没有。看看这四个问题陈述:哪些已经在四元组的哪些部分做出了决定?

A completed game design will cover all four elements of the elemental tetrad: technology, mechanics, story, and aesthetics. Often, your problem statement will constrain you to some established decisions about one (or more) of the four elements, and you will have to build from there. As you try to state your problem, it can be useful to examine it from the point of view of the tetrad to check where you have design freedom and where you don’t. Take a look at these four problem statements: Which ones have already made decisions in what parts of the tetrad?

  1. 我怎样才能制作一款以有趣的方式利用磁铁特性的棋盘游戏?

  2. How can I make a board game that uses the properties of magnets in an interesting way?

  3. 我怎样才能制作一款讲述汉塞尔与格莱特故事的电子游戏?

  4. How can I make a videogame that tells the story of Hansel and Gretel?

  5. 我怎样才能制作一款感觉像超现实主义绘画的游戏?

  6. How can I make a game that feels like a surrealist painting?

  7. 我怎样才能提高俄罗斯方块的水平?

  8. How can I improve on Tetris?

如果奇迹般地,你没有任何限制会怎样?如果你有自由,可以用任何你喜欢的媒介制作任何主题的游戏会怎样?如果是这样(这似乎不太可能!),你需要确定一些限制。选择一个你可能喜欢的故事或一个你想探索的游戏机制。当你选择某个东西时,你就会有一个问题陈述。将你的游戏视为问题的解决方案是一种有用的视角,也是镜头 #14

What if, by some miracle, you have no constraints? What if somehow you have the liberty to make a game about anything, anything at all, using any medium you like? If that is the case (and it seems highly unlikely!), you need to decide some constraints. Pick a story you might like to pursue or a game mechanic you would like to explore. The moment you pick something, you will have a problem statement. Viewing your game as the solution to a problem is a useful perspective and also Lens #14.

如何睡觉

How to Sleep

我们已经陈述了我们的问题,并准备进行头脑风暴!至少,一旦我们做好了充分的准备,我们就会这样做。睡眠对于创意产生过程至关重要——优秀的设计师会最大限度地利用睡眠的巨大力量。我认为,没有人比超现实主义画家萨尔瓦多·达利更好地解释了这一点。以下(达利的秘密#3)摘录自他的书《魔法工艺的五十个秘密》:

We have stated our problem and are ready to brainstorm! At least we will be, once we have properly prepared. Sleep is crucial to the process of idea generation—a good designer uses the tremendous power of sleep to its maximum advantage. No one explains this better, I think, than surrealist painter Salvador Dali. The following (Dali’s Secret #3) is an excerpt from his book Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship:

为了使用钥匙睡眠,你必须坐在骨质扶手椅上,最好是西班牙风格的,头向后仰,靠在拉长的皮革靠背上。你的双手必须垂在椅子扶手外,你的手必须完全放松地仰卧在椅子扶手上……

在这个姿势下,你必须握住一个沉重的琴键,让它悬空,用左手拇指和食指的末端轻轻按压。在琴键下面,你事先要把一个盘子倒扣在地上。做好这些准备后,你只需要让自己逐渐进入一种宁静的午后睡眠状态,就像精神的降落一样灵魂的茴香酒在你身体的方糖中升腾。当钥匙从你指尖掉落的那一刻,你可以肯定它掉在倒置盘子上的声音会把你惊醒,你同样可以肯定,这转瞬即逝的时刻,你无法确定自己是否真的睡着了,但这是完全足够的,因为只需一秒钟,你的整个身心就能通过必要的休息而恢复活力。

In order to make use of the slumber with a key you must seat yourself in a bony armchair, preferably of Spanish style, with your head tilted back and resting on the stretched leather back. Your two hands must hang beyond the arms of the chair, to which your own must be soldered in a supineness of complete relaxation…

In this posture, you must hold a heavy key which you will keep suspended, delicately pressed between the extremities of the thumb and forefinger of your left hand. Under the key you will previously have placed a plate upside down on the floor. Having made these preparations, you will have merely to let yourself be progressively invaded by a sense of serene afternoon sleep, like the spiritual drop of anisette of your soul rising in the cube of sugar of your body. The moment the key drops from your fingers, you may be sure that the noise of its fall on the upside-down plate will awaken you, and you may be equally sure that this fugitive moment during which you cannot be assured of having really slept is totally sufficient, inasmuch as not a second more is needed for your whole physical and psychic being to be revivified by just the necessary amount of repose.

您的沉默伙伴

Your Silent Partner

我们过于着迷并深陷于主观意识之中,以至于忘记了上帝主要通过梦境和幻象来表达自己意愿的古老事实。

—卡尔·荣格

We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

—Carl Jung

达利疯了吗?睡个好觉的好处很容易让人相信——但是,只持续一瞬间的小睡能有什么好处呢?只有当你考虑你的想法从何而来时,答案才会变得清晰。我们大多数好的、聪明的、有创意的想法都不是经过逻辑的、理性的论证而来的。不,真正好的想法似乎只是凭空而来;也就是说,它们来自我们意识表面之下的某个地方——我们称之为潜意识的地方。潜意识还不太为人所知,但它是巨大的、甚至可能是全部创造力的源泉。

Is Dali crazy? The benefits of a good night’s sleep are easy to believe—but what possible benefit could there be in a nap that lasts only a fraction of a second? The answer becomes clear only when you consider where your ideas come from. Most of our good, clever, creative ideas are not arrived at through a process of logical, reasoned argument. No, the really good ideas just seem to pop up out of nowhere; that is, they come from somewhere below the surface of our consciousness—a place we call the subconscious. The subconscious mind is not well understood, but it is a source of tremendous, and possibly all, creative power.

当我们思考自己的梦境时,这种力量的证据显而易见。从你出生前开始,你的潜意识就一直在创造这些迷人的小喜剧和戏剧,每部都不一样,每晚三场。大多数人的梦境远非一连串随机的图像,而是经常具有重大意义。众所周知,许多重要问题在梦中得到解决。其中最著名的一个是化学家弗里德里希·冯·凯库勒的故事,他长期以来一直在思考苯(C 6 H 6)的结构。无论他或其他人如何尝试将原子链拼合在一起,都无法成功。它们没有任何意义,一些科学家想知道这是否表明对分子键合性质存在根本性的误解。然后,他的梦境:

Proof of this power is evident when we consider our dreams. Your subconscious has been creating these fascinating little comedies and dramas, each one different, three shows nightly, since before you were born. Far from a sequence of random images, most people frequently have dreams that are quite meaningful. There are many known instances of important problems solved in dreams. One of the most famous is the story of the chemist Friedrich Von Kekule who had long been puzzling over the structure of benzene (C6H6). No matter how he or anyone else tried to make the chains of atoms fit together, it didn’t work. Nothing about them made sense, and some scientists were wondering if this pointed to a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of molecular bonding. And then, his dream:

原子再次在我眼前舞动。我那双心灵之眼,因许多先前的经历而变得敏锐,能够分辨出各种形状的大型结构,长长的系列,紧密连接在一起;一切都在运动,像蛇一样旋转和扭动。但看到那是什么了吗?一条蛇咬住了自己的尾巴,这个形象在我眼前挑衅地旋转着。就像被一道闪电惊醒了。

Again the atoms danced before my eyes. My mind’s eye, sharpened by many previous experiences, distinguished larger structures of diverse forms, long series, closely joined together; all in motion, turning and twisting like serpents. But see what was that? One serpent had seized its own tail and this image whirled defiantly before my eyes. As by a lightning flash, I awoke.

醒来后,他知道苯的结构是环状的。那么,你会说凯库勒自己想到了这个解决方案吗?从他的描述来看,他只是看着解决方案在他面前展开,当他意识到这一点时,他意识到了这一点。看到了。好像梦的作者已经解决了这个问题,只是把它呈现给凯库勒。但这些梦的作者是谁?

And upon awakening, he knew that benzene’s structure was a ring shape. Now, would you say Kekule himself thought of the solution? From his description, he merely watched the solution play out in front of him and recognized it when he saw it. It was as if the author of the dreams had solved the problem and was merely presenting it to Kekule. But who is the author of these dreams?

一方面,潜意识是我们的一部分,但另一方面,它又似乎是完全独立的。有些人对于将自己的潜意识视为另一个人的想法感到很不舒服。这个想法听起来有点疯狂。但创造力是疯狂的,所以这不应该阻止我们——事实上,它应该鼓励我们。那么,为什么不把它当作一个独立的实体来对待呢?没有人必须知道——它可以是你的小秘密。听起来很奇怪,但将你的潜意识当作另一个人来对待可能非常有用,因为作为人类,我们喜欢将事物拟人化,因为它为我们提供了一个很好理解的思考和与它们互动的模型。你并不是唯一这样做的人——创造性思维已经这样做了数千年。斯蒂芬·金在他的《论写作》一书中描述了他的沉默伙伴:

On one level, the subconscious mind is part of us, but on another, it seems to be quite separate. Some people become quite uncomfortable at the idea of regarding one’s subconscious mind as another person. It is an idea that sounds, well, kind of crazy. But creativity is crazy, so that shouldn’t stop us—in fact, it should encourage us. So, why not treat it like a separate entity? No one has to know—it can be your little secret. Bizarre as it sounds, treating your subconscious like another person can be quite useful, because as humans, we like to anthropomorphize things, because it gives us a well-understood model for thinking about and interacting with them. You won’t be alone in this practice—creative minds have been doing it for thousands of years. Stephen King describes his silent partner in his book On Writing:

有一位缪斯女神(传统上,缪斯女神是女性,但我的缪斯女神是男性;恐怕我们只能接受这一点),但他不会飞到你的写作室,把创造性的仙尘撒得到处都是,洒在你的打字机或电脑台上。他住在地下。他是一个地下室人。你必须下降到他的水平,一旦你到了那里,你就必须为他布置一间公寓。换句话说,你必须做所有的苦差事,而缪斯女神则坐在那里抽雪茄,欣赏他的保龄球奖杯,假装不理你。你觉得这公平吗?我认为这是公平的。那个缪斯女神,他可能不怎么样,他可能不怎么健谈(除非他在值班,否则我从他那里听到的大多是粗鲁的咕哝声),但他有灵感。你理应全力以赴、通宵达旦,因为这个叼着雪茄、长着小翅膀的家伙有一袋魔法。里面的东西可以改变你的生活。

相信我,我知道。

There is a muse (traditionally, the muses were women, but mine’s a guy; I’m afraid we’ll just have to live with that), but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life.

Believe me, I know.

那么,如果我们假装我们的创造性潜意识是另一个人,那个人是什么样的呢?你可能已经在脑海中勾勒出自己的形象了。以下是大多数人似乎都具有的创造性潜意识的一些共同特征:

So, if we pretend our creative subconscious is another person, what is that person like? You might already have a mental picture of yours. Here are some common characteristics of the creative subconscious that most people seem to share:

  • 不会说话,或者至少选择不说话。无论如何,不​​会用语言交流。倾向于通过图像和情感进行交流。

  • Can’t talk, or at least chooses not to. Not in words, anyway. Tends to communicate through imagery and emotions.

  • 冲动。往往不提前计划,往往活在当下。

  • Impulsive. Tends not to plan ahead, tends to live in the moment.

  • 情绪。无论您的感受如何——高兴、生气、激动、害怕——潜意识似乎比意识更深刻、更有力。

  • Emotional. Gets swept up in whatever you are feeling—happy, angry, excited, afraid—the subconscious seems to feel things more deeply and more powerfully than the conscious mind.

  • 好玩。好奇心旺盛,喜欢玩文字游戏和恶作剧。

  • Playful. It has a constant curiosity and loves wordplay and pranks.

  • 不理性。潜意识不受逻辑和理性的约束,经常会产生一些毫无意义的想法。需要去月球吗?也许需要一架长梯子会起作用。有时这些想法只是无用的干扰,但有时它们正是你一直在寻找的聪明观点——例如,谁听说过环状分子?

  • Irrational. Not bound by logic and rationality, the subconscious comes up with ideas that often make no sense. Need to go to the moon? Perhaps a long ladder will work. Sometimes these ideas are a useless distraction, but sometimes they are the clever perspective you have sought all along—whoever heard of a ring molecule, for example?

我有时会想,马克斯兄弟电影中的哈波·马克斯 (Harpo Marx) 这一角色的长期吸引力是否与他几乎完美地符合创造性潜意识的形象有关——也许这是他引起共鸣的主题。哈波不说话(或者不想说话),冲动(吃他看到的东西,追女孩,打架),情绪化(总是笑、哭或发脾气),总是好玩,而且肯定是不理智的。然而,他解决问题的疯狂方法常常能挽救局面,在安静的时刻,他会演奏出天使般美妙的音乐——不是为了别人的赞美,而只是为了享受这样做的乐趣。我喜欢把哈波看作创造性潜意识的守护神(见图7.2)。

I sometimes wonder if the long-term appeal of the character of Harpo Marx, from the Marx Brothers films, has to do with the fact that he matches the profile of the creative subconscious almost perfectly—perhaps this is his resonant theme. Harpo doesn’t speak (or doesn’t care to), is impulsive (eats whatever he sees, chases girls, gets into fights), is very emotional (always laughing, crying, or having fits of anger), is always playful, and is certainly irrational. However, his crazy solutions to problems often save the day, and in quiet moments, he plays music of angelic beauty—not for the praise of others but simply for the joy of doing it. I like to think of Harpo as the patron saint of the creative subconscious (see Figure 7.2).



7.2

FIGURE

7.2

然而,有时,与创造性潜意识一起工作会让你感觉你的脑子里住着一个精神错乱的四岁小孩。如果没有理性的头脑来规划事情、采取预防措施和纠正事情,这个家伙就永远无法独自生存。出于这个原因,许多人养成了忽视潜意识建议的习惯。如果你正在报税,这可能是一个好主意。但如果你在为游戏集思广益,你的沉默伙伴比你更强大。请记住,你的伙伴每晚都在为你创造有趣的虚拟世界,从你出生前开始,他比你更了解体验的本质。以下是一些提示,让你从这种不寻常的创造性伙伴关系中获得最大的收益。

Sometimes, though, working with the creative subconscious can make you feel like you have a deranged four-year-old living inside your head. Without the rational mind to plan things out, take precautions, and set things straight, this guy would never survive on his own. For this reason, many people get in the habit of ignoring what the subconscious mind suggests. If you are doing your taxes, that is probably a good idea. But if you are brainstorming about games, your silent partner is more powerful than you are. Keep in mind that your partner has been creating entertaining virtual worlds for you each night, since before you were born, and he is more in touch with the essence of experience than you can ever hope to be. Here are some tips for getting the most out of this unusual creative partnership.

潜意识提示#1:注意

Subconscious Tip #1: Pay Attention

“我们应该留意梦境吗?”约瑟夫问道。“我们能解释梦境吗?”

大师看着他的眼睛,简洁地说道:“我们应该留心一切,因为我们可以解读一切。”

—赫尔曼·黑塞,《玻璃珠游戏》

“Should we be mindful of dreams?” Joseph asked. “Can we interpret them?”

The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: “We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.”

—Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

像往常一样,关键在于倾听,这次是倾听自己(某种程度上)。潜意识与其他人没什么不同:如果你养成了忽略它的习惯,它就会停止提出建议。如果你养成了倾听它的习惯,认真考虑它的想法,并在得到好的想法时感谢它,它就会开始提供更多更好的建议。那么,你如何倾听一个不会说话的东西呢?你必须做的是更加关注你的想法、感受、情绪和梦想,因为这些都是潜意识交流的方式。这听起来很奇怪,但它确实有效——你越关注潜意识要说的话,它为你做的工作就越多。

As usual, the key is listening, this time to your self (sort of). The subconscious is no different than anyone else: if you get in the habit of ignoring it, it is going to stop making suggestions. If you get in the habit of listening to it, seriously considering its ideas, and thanking it when you get a good one, it will start to offer more and better suggestions. So, how do you listen to something that can’t talk? What you must do is pay closer attention to your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, and your dreams, for those are the ways the subconscious communicates. This sounds really strange, but it really does work—the more you pay attention to what the subconscious has to say, the more work it will do for you.

例如,假设您正在为冲浪游戏集思广益。您正在考虑应该将游戏设置在哪些海滩,以及哪种摄像系统最适合冲浪游戏。突然,您有了一个想法:“如果冲浪板是香蕉会怎么样?”这当然很疯狂——您认为这个想法是从哪里来的?现在,您可能会对自己说:“这太愚蠢了——请让我们将其限制在现实中。”或者您可以花几分钟认真考虑这个想法:“好吧,如果冲浪板是香蕉会怎么样?”然后另一个想法出现了:“让猴子在上面冲浪。”突然间,这似乎并不那么愚蠢——也许这个香蕉冲浪猴子游戏可以有所不同,有些新颖,可能会比您最初计划的更现实的游戏吸引更广泛的受众。即使你最终拒绝了这个想法,你的潜意识也可能会感到更受尊重,并更认真地参与头脑风暴过程,因为你花时间考虑了它的建议——而这花了你什么?只需要几秒钟的静思时间。

For example, say you are brainstorming ideas for a surfing game. You are thinking about which beaches it should be set at and what kind of camera systems are going to be best for a surfing game. Suddenly, you have this inkling of an idea: “What if the surfboards were bananas?” which is crazy, of course—and where do you think it came from? Now, you could say to yourself, “That’s stupid—let’s constrain this to reality, please.” Or you could take a few moments and seriously consider the idea: “Okay, so what if the surfboards were bananas?” And then another thought comes: “With monkeys surfing on them.” And suddenly, this doesn’t seem so dumb—maybe this banana surfing monkey game could be something different, something new, something that might gain you a wider audience than the more realistic game you had originally planned. And even if you ultimately reject the idea, your subconscious might feel a little more respected and take part more seriously in the brainstorming process because of the time you spent considering its suggestions—and what did it cost you? Only a few seconds of quiet reflection.

潜意识提示#2:记录你的想法

Subconscious Tip #2: Record Your Ideas

当然,在头脑风暴会议期间,你会记录下你的想法,但为什么不一直记录下来呢?人类的记忆力很差。通过记录你所有的想法,会发生两件事。首先,你会记录下很多你本来可能会忘记的想法,其次,你会腾出你的大脑去思考其他事情。当你想到一个重要的想法,但没有写下来时,它会在那里乱七八糟,占据空间和精神能量,因为你的大脑认为它很重要,不想忘记这个重要的想法。当你记录下来时,会发生一些神奇的事情——就像你的大脑不需要再去想那么多这个想法一样。我发现这让我的头脑感觉干净和开放,而不是杂乱和拥挤。日本人称这种精神状态为“水之心”,通常翻译为“心如水”。它让你可以自由地认真思考当天的设计,而不会被未记录的重要想法所绊倒。廉价的录音机或录音应用程序对游戏设计师来说是一个非常宝贵的工具。每当你有一个有趣的想法时,只需对着录音机说出来,然后再处理。你必须有纪律地定期转录这些录音,但实际上,这对于大量的想法和干净的思维工作空间来说只是一个小小的代价。

Certainly you will record your ideas during a brainstorming session, but why not record them all the time? The human memory is terrible. By recording all of your ideas, two things happen. First, you’ll have a record of many ideas that you would likely have forgotten otherwise, and second, you’ll free up your mind to think of other things. When you think of an important idea and you don’t write it down, it kind of bangs around up there, taking up space and mental energy, because your mind recognizes it as important and doesn’t want to forget the important idea. Something magic happens when you record it—it is like your mind doesn’t feel the need to think about the idea as much. I find it makes my mind feel clean and open, as opposed to cluttered and cramped. The Japanese call this mental state “mizu no kokoro,” often translated as “mind like water.” It leaves the freedom to think seriously about the design of the day, without tripping over the clutter of important unrecorded ideas. An inexpensive voice recorder or voice recorder app can be an invaluable tool for a game designer. Whenever an interesting idea comes to you, just speak it into the recorder and deal with it later. You have to have the discipline to periodically transcribe those recordings, but really, that is a small price to pay for a huge idea collection and a clean mental workspace.

潜意识提示#3:明智地管理食欲

Subconscious Tip #3: Manage Its Appetites (Judiciously)

让我们实话实说,潜意识有欲望,其中一些欲望是原始的。这些欲望似乎是它工作的一部分,就像理性思维的工作是确定哪些欲望可以安全满足以及如何去满足一样。如果潜意识对其中一种欲望感觉太强烈,它就会沉迷其中。当它沉迷时,它就无法做出好的创造性工作。如果你正在尝试为实时战略游戏想出新点子,而你所能想到的只是糖果棒、你的男朋友或女朋友如何离开你、或者你有多讨厌你的室友,那么你将无法完成很多好的工作,因为这些侵入性想法会分散你的注意力,而这些侵入性想法的来源——你的潜意识,也无法完成任何工作,它必须承担繁重的工作。马斯洛的层次理论(我们将在第 11 章动机中讨论)在这里是一个很好的指南 — — 如果你没有食物、安全和健康的人际关系,你就很难进行自我实现的创造性工作。所以,优先解决这些问题,并想出一些妥协方案,让你的潜意识感到满意,这样它就可以花时间想出天才的主意。当然,要运用良好的判断力 — — 有些欲望是危险的,应该抑制而不是满足,因为如果你满足它们,它们就会增长,从长远来看,这会让一切变得更糟。许多创造型人才有自我毁灭的倾向,可能是因为他们与潜意识的关系密切但管理不善。

Let’s be honest here—the subconscious mind has appetites, some of which are primal. These appetites seem to be part of its job—just as it is the rational mind’s job to determine which appetites can be safely fed and how to go about doing that. If the subconscious mind feels one of these appetites too strongly, it will obsess about it. When it is obsessing, it can’t do good creative work. If you are trying to come up with new ideas for a real-time strategy game and all you can think about is candy bars or how your boyfriend or girlfriend left you or how much you hate your roommate, you aren’t going to be able to get much good work done, because these intrusive thoughts will distract you and the source of these intrusive thoughts, your subconscious mind, isn’t getting any work done either and it’s the one who has to do the heavy lifting. Maslow’s hierarchy, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 11: Motivation, is a pretty good guide here—if you don’t have food, safety, and healthy personal relationships, it will be hard to do self-actualizing creative work. So, make it a priority to get these things worked out, and come up with compromises that will keep your subconscious satisfied so it can spend its time coming up with genius ideas. Use good judgment, of course—some appetites are dangerous and should be curbed, not fed, for if you feed them, they tend to grow, which makes everything much worse in the long term. It is possible that the tendency for so many creative types to self-destruct may be the result of a close, but poorly managed, relationship with their subconscious mind.

潜意识建议#4:睡眠

Subconscious Tip #4: Sleep

一个常见的经历是,晚上遇到的难题,经过睡眠委员会的努力,第二天早上就解决了。

—约翰·斯坦贝克

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

—John Steinbeck

正如萨尔瓦多·达利指出的那样,睡眠至关重要,而不仅仅是用钥匙就能入睡。我们过去认为睡眠是为了身体——但现在很明显,睡眠主要是为了大脑。一些奇怪的分类、归档和整理过程重组似乎在我们睡觉时进行。显然,潜意识在睡眠周期的至少一部分时间里是清醒和活跃的——也就是做梦的部分。我已经与自己的创造性潜意识建立了关系,以至于我有时会感觉到他“在身边”或“不在身边”,我确实发现,当我睡眠不足时,他往往不在身边。感觉就像当我(我们?)睡眠不足或至少他没有参与我正在做的事情时,他会小睡,这种缺席在我的工作中有所体现。我参加过不止一次头脑风暴会议,在会议上我几乎没有做出任何有用的贡献,然后只是随着他“出现”的感觉,大量有用的想法涌现出来。

As Salvador Dali points out, sleep is crucial and not just the slumber with a key. We used to think that sleep was for the body—but it has become clear that sleep is primarily for the benefit of the mind. Some strange process of sorting, filing, and reorganizing seems to be going on when we sleep. Clearly, the subconscious is wide awake and active for at least a part of the sleep cycle—the part that features dreams. I have built up my relationship with my own creative subconscious to the point that I sometimes get a sense of when he “is around” or “is not around,” and I certainly find that when I haven’t had enough sleep, often he isn’t around. It feels like he takes naps when I (we?) haven’t had enough sleep or at least he isn’t participating much in what I’m doing, and this absence shows in my work. I have been in more than one brainstorming meeting where I was contributing almost nothing useful, and then just following a feeling of him “showing up,” a flood of useful ideas came forth.

潜意识提示#5:不要逼得太紧

Subconscious Tip #5: Don’t Push Too Hard

所以现在你必须用你的大脑去劳动,现在你必须抑制你的活动,看看伟大的灵魂会展示什么。

—拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生

So now you must labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity, and see what the great Soul showeth.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

你不需要有任何想法 – 他们只会在准备好时才通知你。

—斯蒂芬·莫法特

You don’t have ideas – they just let you know when they’re ready.

—Stephen Moffat

你是否曾在谈话中试图想出一个名字,也许是你认识的人,也许是某个电影明星,你知道你知道,但就是想不起来?于是你眯起眼睛,试图把答案强行从脑海中赶走——但就是想不起来。于是,你放弃了,继续谈论别的事情。几分钟后,突然,答案出现在你的脑海中。现在,你认为答案是从哪里来的?就好像潜意识在你转向其他事情的时候,一直在努力解决寻找那个名字的问题。当它找到答案时,它就把答案告诉你了。无论你多么专注或努力,都无法让它进展得更快;事实上,这似乎减慢了进程,因为谁能在有人在身后逼近的情况下工作呢?你的创造性工作也是如此。不要指望你的潜意识立即给出答案。给它一个要解决的问题(清晰的问题陈述的另一个优势!),明确问题的重要性,然后让它完成它的工作。答案可能会很快出现,也可能会慢慢出现,或者根本不会出现。但是唠叨和拖延并不能让答案更快出现——它只会让事情慢下来。

Did you ever try to think of a name during a conversation, maybe someone you know, maybe some movie star, and you know you know it, but just can’t think of it? So you squint your eyes and try and force the answer out of your mind—but it just doesn’t come. So, you give up and move on, talking about something else. A few minutes later, suddenly the answer pops into your mind. Now, where do you think that came from? It is as if the subconscious was working on the problem of finding that name in the background while you moved on to other things. When it found the answer, it gave it to you. No amount of concentration or straining was going to move it along faster; in fact, this seems to slow the process down, because who can work with someone looming over their shoulder? The same goes for your creative work. Don’t expect immediate answers from your subconscious. Give it a problem to solve (one more advantage of a clear problem statement!), make clear the problem is important, and leave it to do its work. The answer might come quickly, it might come slowly, or it might not come at all. But nagging and looming won’t make it come any faster—it will just slow things down.

个人关系

A Personal Relationship

你可能会发现你与潜意识的关系与我在这里描述的不同。这是意料之中的——不同的人思维方式不同。重要的是,你要找到最适合自己的技巧,而唯一能做到这一点的方法就是听从你的直觉(潜意识的暗示),了解什么会产生创造性成果,然后开始尝试实验。其中一些实验必然会很奇怪。《用钥匙入睡》很奇怪,但对达利来说却很有效。把你的潜意识当成全职室友很奇怪,但对斯蒂芬·金来说却很有效。要成为最好的游戏设计师,你必须找到适合自己的技巧,没有人能告诉你这些技巧是什么——你必须自己去发现它们。

You may find that your relationship with your subconscious is different than what I describe here. This is expected—different people’s minds work in different ways. The important thing is that you find the techniques that work best for you, and the only way you can do that is by following your instincts (hints from the subconscious) about what will be creatively productive and start trying experiments. Some of these will be necessarily strange. Slumber with a key is strange, but it worked for Dali. Treating your subconscious mind like a full-time roommate is strange, but it works for Stephen King. To become the best game designer you can be, you must find the techniques that work for you, and no one can tell you what those are—you must discover them yourself.

16 个头脑风暴技巧

Sixteen Nitty-Gritty Brainstorming Tips

创造力是为那些从一开始就没有好想法的人准备的。

-匿名的

Creativity is for people who don’t have a good idea in the first place.

—Anonymous

你和你的隐名合伙人已经准备好解决问题了。现在到了最有趣的部分:集思广益!也就是说,当有想法时,你会觉得很有趣——当没有想法时,你会觉得很害怕!那么,你如何确保想法真的会出现呢?

You and your silent partner are ready to tackle your problem. Now comes the fun part: brainstorming! That is, it’s fun when the ideas come—when they don’t, it’s terrifying! So, how can you make sure they do come?

头脑风暴技巧#1:写下答案

Brainstorm Tip #1: The Write Answer

您已经陈述了您的问题。现在,开始写下解决方案吧!为什么要写下来?为什么不坐下来思考,直到那个绝妙的想法浮现在您的脑海中?因为您的记忆力很差!您将需要将数十个甚至数百个想法中的小部分混合搭配,并且您永远无法记住它们。更糟糕的是,正如我们之前讨论的那样,当您的脑子里有许多不连贯的想法时,它们会挤掉新的想法。所以腾出空间!您是否真的对某人很生气,所以您给他们写了一封恶毒的信(您可能从未寄出过),然后立即感觉好多了?当您将自己的想法写在纸上时,会发生神奇的事情。那就去做吧!

You’ve stated your problem. Now, start writing down solutions! Why write them down? Why not just sit and think until that brilliant idea comes to you? Because your memory is terrible! You are going to want to mix and match little pieces from dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas and you will never be able to remember them all. Even worse, as we discussed earlier, when you have many disconnected ideas in your head, they can crowd out new ideas. So make room! Were you ever really mad at someone so you wrote them a nasty letter (which you might have never sent) and immediately felt better? Something magic happens when you put your ideas on paper. So do it!

头脑风暴提示#2:书写还是打字?

Brainstorm Tip #2: Write or Type?

记录想法的最佳方式是什么?只要对你最有效就行!有些人最喜欢打字,有些人则喜欢写作。漫画家兼作家 Lynda Barry 坚持认为,一支移动的笔有一种魔力,可以以电脑键盘无法比拟的方式将想法从你的脑海中提取出来,我倾向于同意这种观点。

What is the best way to record your ideas? Whatever works best for you! Some people like typing best, some like writing. Cartoonist and writer Lynda Barry insists that there is magic in a moving pen that pulls ideas out of your mind in a way that a computer keyboard can never match, and I tend to agree.

我个人喜欢在无线条的纸上书写,因为它可以提供更多的表达和创造力——你可以圈出想法,画出小草图,用箭头连接想法,划掉一些东西等等。你总是可以稍后打出好的东西。

I personally like writing on unlined paper, because it allows for more expression and creativity—you can circle ideas, draw little sketches, connect ideas with arrows, cross things out, etc. You can always type up the good stuff later.

头脑风暴技巧#3:草图

Brainstorm Tip #3: Sketch

并非所有的想法都可以通过文字轻松表达。所以画一些画吧!你不会画画没关系——试试吧!当你用视觉表达你的想法时,你不仅会更容易记住它们,你画的画也会​​引发更多的想法。试试这个。你会惊讶于它的效果。需要制作一个关于老鼠的游戏吗?开始画一些老鼠——非常粗糙——只是粗糙的小老鼠斑点。我保证你会发现一分钟前根本不存在的想法突然出现在你的脑海里。

Not all ideas can be easily expressed through text. So draw some pictures! It doesn’t matter that you can’t draw—try! When you express your ideas visually, not only will you remember them more easily, the pictures you draw will trigger more ideas. Try this out. You’ll be surprised at how well it works. Need to make a game about mice? Start drawing some mice—real rough—just crude little mouse blobs. I guarantee you will find ideas popping into your head that simply weren’t there a minute ago.

头脑风暴技巧#4:玩具

Brainstorm Tip #4: Toys

另一种让您的思维直观地参与到问题中的方法是将一些玩具带到桌子上。选择一些与您的问题相关的玩具和一些与之无关的玩具!您认为为什么像 TGI Friday's 这样的餐厅会在墙上挂上所有那些疯狂的东西?它们只是装饰吗?不。当人们看到它时,他们会想到要谈论的事情,他们想到要谈论的事情越多,他们在餐厅的体验就越愉快。如果它对餐馆老板有用,那么它对您也同样有用。玩具不仅在视觉上激发您的创造力 - 它们还可以通过触觉方式激发您的创造力。更好的是,为什么不带一大块粘土或 Play-Doh,这样您就可以制作出您想法的小雕塑?这听起来很傻,但创造力就是傻。

Another way to get your mind visually engaged in your problem is to bring some toys to the table. Pick some that have something to do with your problem and some that have nothing to do with it! Why do you think that restaurants like TGI Friday’s have all that crazy stuff on the walls? Is it just decoration? No. When people see it, they think of things to talk about, and the more things they think of to talk about, the more enjoyable their restaurant experience. If it works for restaurateurs, it can work for you. Toys don’t just visually engage your creativity—they also engage it in a tactile way. Even better, why not bring a big lump of clay, or Play-Doh, so you can make little sculptures of your ideas? It sounds silly, but creativity is silly.

头脑风暴技巧#5:改变你的观点

Brainstorm Tip #5: Change Your Perspective

本书中镜头的全部意义在于让您从不同的角度看待您的游戏。但为什么要止步于此呢?不要只是坐在椅子上集思广益——站起来——那里的东西看起来不一样!去不同的地方——让自己沉浸在不同的事物中。在公交车上、在海滩、在商场或在玩具店里,倒立着集思广益——任何激发您想象力并让您想到新事物的事情都值得去做。

The whole point of the lenses in this book is that they get you looking at your game from different perspectives. But why stop there? Don’t just brainstorm sitting in your chair—stand up on your chair—things look different up there! Go to different places—immerse yourself in different things. Brainstorm on the bus, at the beach, at the mall, or in a toy store, while standing on your head—anything that sparks your imagination and makes you think of new things is worth doing.

头脑风暴技巧#6:沉浸其中

Brainstorm Tip #6: Immerse Yourself

您已经陈述了您的问题;现在就让自己沉浸其中!在当地商店找到您的目标受众——他们在买什么?为什么?偷听他们说话——他们在谈论什么?什么对他们来说是重要的?您需要非常了解这些人。您已经确定了一项技术吗?学习您能学到的一切——在墙上贴满它的规格——找到它能做的、但还没有人注意到的秘密。您是否锁定了一个主题或故事情节?找到类似故事的其他改编版并阅读或观看它们。您是否需要对旧的游戏机制做一些新的事情?玩尽可能多的使用该机制的游戏——以及一些不使用的游戏!

You’ve stated your problem; now immerse yourself in it! Find people in your target audience at a local store—what are they buying? Why? Eavesdrop on them—what are they talking about? What is important to them? You need to know these people intimately. Have you settled on a technology already? Learn everything you can about it—cover your walls with its specs—find that secret thing it can do that no one has noticed yet. Are you locked into a theme or storyline? Find other adaptations of similar stories and read or watch them. Do you need to do something new with an old gameplay mechanic? Play as many games that use that mechanic as you can find—and some that don’t!

头脑风暴技巧#7:开玩笑

Brainstorm Tip #7: Crack Jokes

有些人对用幽默来做严肃的工作感到紧张,但当你进行头脑风暴时,有时笑话可以完成工作。笑话(你是幽闭恐惧症患者吗?)可以放松我们的思想(完全偏颇可能吗?)并让我们从以前错过的角度看待事物(拯救鲸鱼!收集整套!)——而新的视角正是伟大想法产生的方式!但要注意!笑话可能会让你偏离轨道,特别是在群体环境中。有时偏离轨道是正常的(好的想法可能不在轨道上);只要你有责任让事情回到正轨就行了。头脑风暴的戒律是:“脱轨者,重回正轨。”

Some people are nervous about using humor to do serious work, but when you are brainstorming, sometimes jokes are what get the job done. Jokes (Can you be a closet claustrophobic?) loosen up our minds (Is it possible to be totally partial?) and make us see things from a perspective that we missed before (Save the whales! Collect the whole set!)—and new perspectives are how great ideas happen! Be warned, though! Jokes can get you off track, especially in a group setting. It’s fine to get off track sometimes (the good ideas might not be on the track); just make it your responsibility to get things back on track. A brainstorming commandment to live by: “He who derails, rerails.”

头脑风暴技巧#8:不惜一切代价

Brainstorm Tip #8: Spare No Expense

从孩提时代开始,我们大多数人就被教育不要浪费资源:“不要使用好的记号笔!”“不要浪费纸张!”“不要浪费钱!”头脑风暴不是节俭的时候。永远不要让材料妨碍你的创造力。你要努力寻找百万美元的想法——你不能让几分钱的纸张或墨水妨碍你。在头脑风暴时,我喜欢用花式笔和厚纸,我喜欢用大号字母书写,只使用纸张的一面。为什么?部分原因是我可以把所有的纸张铺在桌子上,或者铺在地板上,如果需要的话,可以从远处考虑所有的想法。部分原因是它给这个过程带来了一定的尊严。但部分原因是它感觉很好!在头脑风暴时,你需要做你觉得正确的事情——你做的每一件让你更有创造力的小事都会增加产生伟大想法的机会。适合一个人的东西不一定适合所有人——你必须不断尝试才能找到最有效的方法。但是如果你得不到你喜欢的材料,不要抱怨——用你已有的材料吧!还有很多工作要做!

From childhood, most of us are trained not to waste resources: “Don’t use the good markers!” “Don’t waste paper!” “Don’t waste money!” Brainstorming is not the time to be frugal. Never let materials get in the way of your creativity. You are going to be trying to find the million-dollar ideas—you can’t let a few pennies for paper or ink get in the way. When brainstorming, I like to use a fancy pen and heavy gauge paper, and I like to write in big letters, only using one side of the paper. Why? Partly because I can lay out all the sheets on the table, or on the floor, and consider all the ideas from a distance if I need to. Partly because it gives the process a certain dignity. But partly because it just feels right! And when brainstorming, you need to do what feels right for you—every little thing you do that makes you a little more creatively comfortable increases the chances that the great idea will come. And what is right for one person isn’t right for everyone—you must constantly experiment to find what works best. But if you can’t get the materials you prefer, don’t you dare whine about it—use what you’ve got! There is work to be done!

头脑风暴技巧#9:墙上的字迹

Brainstorm Tip #9: The Writing on the Wall

您可能更喜欢在白板上写字,而不是在纸上写字。如果是这样,那就这样做吧!如果您在团队环境中进行头脑风暴,您将需要某种每个人都能同时看到的解决方案。有些人喜欢使用索引卡来写下他们的想法。这些可以钉在公告板上,并且具有易于重新定位的优点。缺点是它们有时太小,无法容纳一个大想法。我发现我更喜欢巨大的(2 英尺×2.5 英尺)便利贴纸(昂贵,但我们不惜一切代价!)或带有遮蔽胶带的牛皮纸。这样,您可以在墙上写清单,但当您没有空间时可以轻松重新定位它们。更好的是,您可以将它们取下来,堆叠起来,卷起来并存放起来。一年后,当有人说:“嘿,我们去年有什么机器人游戏创意?”你可以把它们拿出来,贴起来,然后重新开始你的头脑风暴会议,就好像它从未停止过一样。

You might prefer writing on a whiteboard to writing on paper. If so, do it! If you are brainstorming in a team setting, you will need some kind of solution that everyone can see at once. Some people like to use index cards to write down their ideas. These can be tacked to a bulletin board and have the advantage of being easily repositioned. The downside is that they are sometimes too small for a big idea. I find I prefer giant (2 ft × 2.5 ft) Post-It sheets (expensive, but we spare no expense!) or sheets of butcher paper with masking tape. This way, you can write lists on the wall but easily reposition them when you run out of room. Even better, you can take them down, stack them, roll them up, and store them. A year later, when someone says, “Hey, what were some of those robot game ideas we had last year?” you can go pull them out, stick them up, and restart your brainstorming session as if it had never stopped.

头脑风暴技巧#10:空间记忆

Brainstorm Tip #10: The Space Remembers

这句绝妙的短语出自汤姆·凯利的《创新的艺术》一书。将东西贴在墙上的另一个原因是:我们记不住清单,但记得很清楚物品的摆放位置。将你的想法贴在房间里的各个角落,你就能更容易地记住它们在哪里。这一点至关重要,因为你将尝试找出数十种不同想法之间的联系,并且你需要任何能得到的帮助——特别是如果你将在几个会议上进行头脑风暴。这非常了不起。如果你将一堆想法贴在墙上,然后离开几周,你会忘记其中的大部分。但当你走回贴着这些想法的房间时,你会感觉自己从未离开过。

This excellent phrase is from the book The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley. One more reason to put things on the wall: our memory for lists is bad, but our memory for where things are positioned around us is very good. By posting your ideas in the room all around you, you can more easily remember where they are. This is crucial, since you will be trying to find connections between dozens of different ideas and you need any help you can get—particularly if you will be brainstorming over several sessions. It is quite remarkable. If you put a bunch of ideas up on the walls and you go away for a few weeks, you will forget most of it. But walk back into that room where the ideas are posted, and it feels like you never left.

头脑风暴技巧#11:写下所有内容

Brainstorm Tip #11: Write Everything

拥有一个好想法的最好方法就是拥有很多想法。

—莱纳斯·鲍林

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

—Linus Pauling

你已经准备好了漂亮的笔、漂亮的纸、漂亮的咖啡、一些玩具、一些橡皮泥,以及你认为可能需要的所有创造力的东西。现在,你在等待那个绝妙的主意出现。错误!别等了——开始写下你能想到的所有与你的问题有点关联的东西。写下你脑子里出现的每一个愚蠢的想法。其中很多都是愚蠢的。但是你必须在好主意出现之前清除掉这些愚蠢的想法。有时一个愚蠢的想法会成为天才想法的灵感,所以把它们全部写下来。不要审查自己。你必须放弃对犯错的恐惧和对看起来很傻的恐惧。这对我们大多数人来说都很难,但随着练习而来。如果你正在和其他人集思广益,一定不要审查他们——他们的愚蠢想法和你的愚蠢想法一样好!

You’ve got your fancy pens, your fancy paper, your fancy coffee, some toys, some modeling clay, everything you think you might need to be creative. Now you are waiting for that brilliant idea to come. Mistake! Don’t wait—just start writing down everything you can think of that is remotely connected to your problem. Write down every stupid idea that comes into your head. And a lot of them will be stupid. But you have to get the stupid ones out of the way before the good ones start showing up. And sometimes a stupid idea becomes the inspiration for a genius idea, so write it all down. Don’t censor yourself. You have to give up your fear of being wrong and your fear of looking silly. This is hard for most of us to do, but it comes with practice. And if you are brainstorming with other people, certainly don’t censor them—their stupid ideas are just as good as your stupid ideas!

头脑风暴技巧#12:给列表编号

Brainstorm Tip #12: Number Your Lists

头脑风暴的大部分内容都是列表。当你列出列表时,给它们编号!这样做有两个好处:首先,它使列表更容易讨论(“我喜欢 3 到 7 个想法,但 8 是我最喜欢的!”);其次,这非常奇怪,当事物列表是有编号的,这些数字以某种方式赋予列表中事物一定的尊严。考虑以下两个列表:

Much of your brainstorming will consist of lists. When you make lists, number them! This does two things: First, it makes the lists easier to discuss (“I like ideas 3 through 7, but 8 is my favorite!”) and, secondly, and this is extremely weird, when a list of things is numbered, the numbers somehow give a certain dignity to the things in the list. Consider these two lists:

  1. 鸡汤

  2. Chicken broth

  3. 雨伞

  4. Umbrellas

  5. Wind

  6. 刮铲

  7. Spatulas

  • 鸡汤

  • Chicken broth

  • 雨伞

  • Umbrellas

  • Wind

  • 刮铲

  • Spatulas

不知为何,编号列表中的项目似乎更重要?如果其中一个突然消失,您更有可能注意到。这种尊严将使您(和其他人)更有可能认真对待列表中的想法。

Don’t the items in the numbered list seem more important, somehow? If one of them suddenly disappeared, you would be much more likely to notice. This dignity will make you (and others) more likely to take the ideas on the list seriously.

头脑风暴技巧#13:打破你的假设

Brainstorm Tip #13: Destroy Your Assumptions

我从设计师 Rob Daviau 那里学到了这条绝妙的技巧。列出你认为正确的所有游戏内容,例如“我假设这款游戏适合在室内玩”、“我假设玩家会看屏幕”和“我假设玩家只用一根手指触摸屏幕”。这可能是一个很长的列表,因为我们假设的内容太多了。一旦你有了一个好的列表,就仔细检查每一项,并思考如果该假设不成立,你的游戏会如何运作。大多数时候,假设必须成立。但偶尔推翻你的一个假设会让你有深刻的见解。Rob 说,他在设计Risk Legacy时考虑过推翻标准的棋盘游戏假设:“一个游戏不会影响下一个游戏。”

I learned this excellent tip from designer Rob Daviau. Make a list of everything about your game that you are assuming to be true, such as “I assume that it is designed to be played indoors,” “I assume that the player will look at the screen,” and “I assume the player only uses one finger to touch the screen.” This can be a long list, because we assume so much. Once you have a good list, go through each item, and think about how your game would work if that assumption wasn’t true. Most of the time, the assumption must stand. But once in a while, blowing up one of your assumptions will give you a great insight. Rob says he arrived at the design for Risk Legacy when he considered destroying the standard board game assumption: “One game does not affect the next one.”

头脑风暴技巧#14:混合搭配类别

Brainstorm Tip #14: Mix and Match Categories

当游戏创意像雅典娜一样从你的头脑中涌现出来并完全成型时,这真是太棒了。但情况并非每次都是这样。帮助创意汇集在一起​​的一个好方法是按类别进行头脑风暴。元素四元组在这里派上用场。例如,你可能已经决定要为十几岁的女孩制作一款游戏。你可以制作单独的列表,然后开始混合搭配,如下所示:

It’s great when game ideas, Athena-like, spring forth from your head, fully formed. But it doesn’t happen that way every time. A great technique for helping ideas come together is to brainstorm in categories. The elemental tetrad comes in handy here. For example, you might have decided you want to make a game for teenage girls. You might make separate lists, which you can start to mix and match, something like the following:

技术理念

Technology Ideas

  1. 智能手机游戏

  2. Smartphone game

  3. 虚拟现实耳机游戏

  4. Virtual reality headset game

  5. 个人电脑

  6. PC

  7. 与即时通讯集成

  8. Integrated with instant messaging

  9. 游戏机

  10. Game console

力学理念

Mechanics Ideas

  1. 类似模拟人生的游戏。

  2. Sims-like game.

  3. 互动小说游戏。

  4. Interactive fiction game.

  5. 胜利者会结交最多的朋友。

  6. The winner makes the most friends.

  7. 尝试传播有关其他玩家的谣言。

  8. Try to spread rumors about the other players.

  9. 尽力帮助尽可能多的人。

  10. Try to help as many people as possible.

  11. 类似俄罗斯方块的游戏。

  12. Tetris-like game.

故事创意

Story Ideas

  1. 高中戏剧。

  2. High school drama.

  3. 以大学为主题。

  4. College themed.

  5. 你扮演丘比特。

  6. You play Cupid.

  7. 你是一位电视明星。

  8. You’re a TV star.

  9. 医院主题。

  10. Hospital theme.

  11. 音乐主题。

    1. 你是一位摇滚明星。

    2. 你是一名舞者。

  12. Music theme.

    1. You’re a rock star.

    2. You’re a dancer.

美学理念

Aesthetic Ideas

  1. 卡通渲染。

  2. Cel shaded.

  3. 动漫风格。

  4. Anime style.

  5. 所有角色都是动物。

  6. All characters are animals.

  7. R&B 音乐定义了游戏。

  8. R&B music defines the game.

  9. 前卫摇滚/朋克音乐定义了这种感觉。

  10. Edgy rock/punk music defines the feel.

一旦你有了这样的列表(虽然每个列表上应该有十几个条目!),你就可以自由地开始混合和匹配想法——也许是一个基于智能手机的类似俄罗斯方块的游戏,它有一个医院主题,其中所有角色都是动物……或者一款类似《模拟人生》的主机游戏,以高中为背景,采用动漫风格?有了这些可以轻松混合搭配的部分创意列表,您可能从未想过的完整游戏创意就会开始在各处涌现,每个创意都有自己的生命。也不要害怕创建其他类别,因为您需要它们!

Once you have lists like these (though you should have dozen more entries on each list!), you are free to start mixing and matching ideas—maybe a smartphone-based Tetris-like game, which has a hospital theme, where all the characters are animals…. Or how about a Sims-like console game based on high school with an anime style? By having all these lists of partial ideas that can easily be mixed and matched, fully formed game ideas that you might never have thought of start springing up all over the place, each taking on a life of their own. Don’t be afraid to make up other categories, either, as you need them!

头脑风暴技巧#15:自言自语

Brainstorm Tip #15: Talk to Yourself

社会上对自言自语有着强烈的偏见。但是,当独自进行头脑风暴时,有些人发现它确实很有帮助——大声说出事情比仅仅在脑子里思考更真实。找一个你可以自由自言自语而不会被人嘲笑的地方。另一个技巧是,如果你在公共场所进行头脑风暴,在自言自语时把手机放在头旁边——这很傻,但很有效。

There is tremendous social stigma against talking to yourself. But when brainstorming alone, some people find it really helpful—there is something about saying things out loud that makes them more real than just thinking them in your head. Find a place where you can freely talk to yourself without getting funny looks. Another trick, if you are brainstorming in a public place, hold a cell phone next to your head while you talk to yourself—it’s silly, but it works.

头脑风暴技巧#16:寻找合作伙伴

Brainstorm Tip #16: Find a Partner

与他人一起集思广益与独自集思广益截然不同。找到合适的集思广益伙伴可以带来天壤之别——有时你们两人能比单独一个人更快地找到绝佳解决方案,因为你们会来回交流想法并完成对方的句子。只要有人大声说话,即使他们什么也没说,有时也能加快进程。但请记住,增加更多人并不一定有帮助。通常,不超过四人的小组是最好的。小组在集思广益解决一个狭窄的问题时效果最好,而不是解决一个广泛的开放式问题。而且,老实说,大多数小组的集思广益方式都是错误的。研究表明,一群人只是出现在房间里试图就一个想法进行头脑风暴,这只会浪费时间。更好的方法是先让每个人独立集思广益,然后才聚在一起分享想法、混合搭配,并共同解决问题。此外,有些人不适合作为头脑风暴的伙伴——这些人通常试图挑出每个想法的毛病,或者品味非常狭隘。最好避开这些人,没有他们,你的工作效率会更高。团队头脑风暴可以带来巨大的好处,也会带来巨大的危险,我们将在第 25 章“团队”中详细讨论。

When you brainstorm with other people, it is a very different experience than brainstorming alone. Finding the right brainstorming partner can make a world of difference—sometimes the two of you can get to great solutions many times faster than either of you could alone, as you bounce ideas back and forth and complete one another’s sentences. Just having someone to talk out loud to, even if they say nothing, can sometimes move the process along faster. Do keep in mind that adding more and more people doesn’t necessarily help, though. Usually, small groups of no more than four are best. Groups work best when brainstorming a narrow problem, not a broad, open-ended one. And, honestly, most groups go about brainstorming all wrong. Research shows that a group just showing up in a room trying to brainstorm cold on an idea is a recipe for wasted time. Much better is to have each individual brainstorm independently first and only then get together to share ideas, mix and match them, and solve problems together. Also, certain people make bad brainstorming partners—these are usually people who try to poke holes in every idea or people who have very narrow tastes. These people are best avoided, and you’ll be more productive without them. Team brainstorming can have tremendous benefits and tremendous perils, which we will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 25: Team.

看看这些想法!现在怎么办?

Look At All These Ideas! Now What?

本章的目标是“想出一个点子”。经过一番头脑风暴,你可能就有一百个点子了!这就是应该的样子。游戏设计师必须能够就任何主题想出几十个点子。随着你的练习,你将能够在更短的时间内想出更多更好的点子。但这仅仅是个开始设计过程。下一步是缩小这个广泛的想法列表,并开始利用它们做一些有用的事情。

Our goal in this chapter was to “think of an idea.” After a little brainstorming, you probably have a hundred! And this is how it should be. A game designer must be able to come up with dozens of ideas on any topic. As you practice, you will be able to come up with more and better ideas in less time. But this is just the beginning of your design process. The next step is to narrow down this broad list of ideas and start doing something useful with them.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • Lynda Barry 的《What It Is》《Picture This》。这两本书非常精彩,文字和插图天衣无缝地融合在一起,会同时用创作过程的残酷现实震撼你,并给你灵感。

  • What It Is and Picture This by Lynda Barry. These magnificent books, where text and artwork are seamlessly merged, will simultaneously assault and inspire you with the gory realities of the creative process.

  • 萨尔瓦多·达利的《魔法工艺的五十个秘密》。这本书鲜为人知,但却是了解创意天才思想的绝佳窗口。

  • Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship by Salvador Dali. This book is largely unknown but an excellent window into the mind of a creative genius.

  • 凯尔·格雷、凯尔·加布勒、马特·库西奇和沙林·肖丹合著的《7 天游戏原型设计》。这篇短文充满了关于快速制作出色游戏原型的极好建议。

  • Prototyping a Game in 7 Days by Kyle Gray, Kyle Gabler, Matt Kucic, and Shalin Shodhan. This short essay is densely packed with excellent advice about prototyping great games fast.

  • 朱利安·杰恩斯的《双腔心智的崩坏中的意识起源》 ,第 1 章。这本备受争议的书将让你重新思考意识的本质以及你与潜意识的关系。

  • The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, Chapter 1. This controversial book will make you think twice about the nature of consciousness and your relationship with your subconscious.

  • 群体思维:头脑风暴的神话,乔纳·莱勒,《纽约客》。2012 年 1 月 30 日。对头脑风暴的过去、现在和未来的精彩概述。

  • Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker. January 30, 2012. An excellent overview of the past, present, and future of brainstorming.

  • 大卫·林奇的《捕捉大鱼》。这位著名电影制片人的这本小书提供了精彩的创造力快照。

  • Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch. This brief book by a famous filmmaker provides excellent snapshots of creativity in action.

  • Thinkertoys:创造性思维技巧手册,作者:Michael Michalko。如果您正在寻找一套简单的头脑风暴工具,那么这本书正适合您。

  • Thinkertoys: a Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko. If you are looking for a collection of simple brainstorming tools, this book is for you.

第八

CHAPTER EIGHT

游戏通过迭代不断改进

The Game Improves through Iteration



8.1

FIGURE

8.1

选择一个想法

Choosing an Idea

一旦你做出决定,整个宇宙都会协力帮你实现它。

—爱默生

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

—Emerson

经过痛苦而又狂喜的头脑风暴会议后,你面前有一大堆想法。许多设计师就是在这里绊倒的。他们有太多喜欢的想法,不知道该选什么。或者他们有很多平庸的想法,但没有什么特别的,所以他们又不知道该选什么。所以他们徘徊了太久,处于犹豫不决的迷雾中,希望只要再等一会儿,“正确的想法”就会突然变得清晰起来。

After a painfully rapturous brainstorming session, you have a huge list of ideas in front of you. This is where many designers trip up. They have so many ideas they like, they aren’t sure what to pick. Or they have a lot of mediocre ideas, but nothing spectacular, so again they aren’t sure what to pick. So they float around for too long, in a vague haze of indecision, hoping that the “right idea” will suddenly become clear, if they just wait a little longer.

但是,当你选定一个想法并决定将其实现时,就会发生一些神奇的事情。正如斯坦贝克在《人鼠之间》中所说,“计划是真实存在的。”一旦你内心下定决心,“是的,我要这么做”,之前忽略的缺陷就会突然显现出来,好处也是如此。这有点像抛硬币来做决定——当硬币落下时,你会突然知道自己真正想要什么。我们内心深处的某种东西会让我们在决定做某件事之前和承诺之后以不同的方式思考问题。所以,利用人性的这种怪癖——对你的设计做出快速决定,下定决心坚持下去,并立即开始思考你刚刚做出的选择的后果。

But something magic happens when you pick an idea and decide you are going to make it happen. As Steinbeck says in Of Mice and Men, “A plan is a real thing.” Once you make the internal decision, “Yes, I’m going to do this,” flaws you missed before suddenly become evident, as do benefits. It is kind of like flipping a coin to make a decision—when the coin comes down, you suddenly know what you really want. There is something inside us that makes us think about things differently before we’ve decided to do them than after we’ve committed. So take advantage of this quirk of human nature—make snap decisions about your design, commit to sticking with them, and immediately start thinking about the consequences of the choice you have just made.

但是,如果你突然意识到自己做出了错误的选择,该怎么办?答案很简单:当你意识到错误时,要准备好改变你的决定。很多人觉得这很难——一旦他们做出了设计决定,他们就不愿意放弃。你不能承受这种多愁善感。创意不像精美的瓷器,创意就像纸杯——它们的制造成本很低,当一个有洞的时候,就去买另一个。

But what if, with the enlightenment that suddenly comes with commitment, you realize you’ve made the wrong choice? The answer is easy: be ready to reverse your decision when you realize it is wrong. Many people find this difficult—once they have made a design decision, they are uncomfortable letting it go. You can’t afford this kind of sentimentality. Ideas are not like fine china, ideas are like paper cups—they are cheap to manufacture, and when one has holes in it, go get another one.

有些人对这种仓促决定和突然逆转的组合感到十分不安。但这是充分利用决策能力的最有效方式,游戏设计就是关于决策的——你需要尽可能快地做出最好的决定,而这种略显古怪的行为就是实现这一目标的方式。尽早承诺一个想法总是比推迟好——你会比等待考虑潜在替代方案更快地做出一个好的决定。只是不要爱上你的决定,并准备在它对你不起作用时立即扭转它。

Some people are quite disconcerted by this combination of snap decisions combined with sudden reversals. But it is the most efficient way to make full use of your decision-making power, and game design is all about making decisions—you need to make the best decisions possible, as fast as possible, and this slightly eccentric behavior is the way to do it. It’s always better to commit to an idea sooner, rather than later—you will get to a good decision much faster than if you bide your time considering potential alternatives. Just don’t fall in love with your decision and be ready to reverse it the moment it isn’t working for you.

那么你该如何选择呢?从某种意义上说,答案是“最好的猜测,苏鲁先生”。从更分析的角度来看,当你开始开发一个种子创意时,你需要考虑许多因素。在你选择种子之前,记住你的想法必须发展成什么样子是有益的。

So how do you pick? In one sense, the answer is, “Best guess, Mr. Sulu.” More analytically, there are many factors you will need to consider as you start developing a seed idea. It can pay to keep in mind what your idea must grow into before you even choose a seed.

八个过滤器

The Eight Filters

最终完成的设计必须通过 8 项测试或筛选。只有通过所有测试,您的设计才算“足够好”。一旦设计未通过其中一项测试,您就必须更改设计,然后再次通过所有 8 项测试或“筛选”,因为通过一项筛选的更改可能会导致其无法通过另一项筛选。从某种意义上说,设计过程主要包括陈述问题、获得初步想法,以及找到通过所有 8 项筛选的方法。

Your finished design will eventually have to make it through eight tests, or filters. Only when it passes all of them is your design “good enough.” Whenever it fails one of these tests, you will have to change the design and then run it through all eight tests, or “filters,” again, because a change that makes it past one filter might make it fail in another one. In a sense, the design process mainly consists of stating your problem, getting an initial idea, and finding a way to get it past all eight filters.

这八个过滤器如下:

The eight filters are as follows:

  • 过滤器 #1:艺术冲动:这是最个人化的过滤器。作为设计师,你基本上会问自己这款游戏是否“让你感觉正确”,如果感觉正确,那么它就通过了测试。如果感觉不正确,那么就需要做出一些改变。你的直觉和团队的直觉很重要。它们并不总是正确的,但其他过滤器会平衡这一点。

  • Filter #1: Artistic impulse: This is the most personal of the filters. You, as the designer, basically ask yourself whether the game “feels right” to you, and if it does, it passes the test. If it doesn’t, something needs to change. Your gut feelings and the gut feelings of your team are important. They won’t always be right, but the other filters will balance that out.

  • 关键问题:“这个游戏感觉对吗?”

  • Key Question: “Does this game feel right?”

  • 过滤器 #2:人口统计:你的游戏可能有一个目标受众。这可能是一个年龄段,一个性别,或者一些其他独特的受众(例如,“高尔夫爱好者”)。你必须考虑你的设计是否适合你所针对的人口统计。人口统计将在第 9 章玩家中更详细地讨论。

  • Filter #2: Demographics: Your game is likely to have an intended audience. This might be an age bracket, or a gender, or some other distinct audience (e.g., “golf enthusiasts”). You have to consider whether your design is right for the demographic you are targeting. Demographics will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9: Player.

  • 关键问题:“目标受众会足够喜欢这个游戏吗?”

  • Key Question: “Will the intended audience like this game enough?”

  • 过滤器 #3:体验设计:要应用此过滤器,请考虑您所了解的有关创建良好体验的所有知识,包括美学、兴趣曲线、共鸣主题和游戏平衡。本书中的许多镜头都与体验设计有关 — 要通过此过滤器,您的游戏必须经得起许多镜头的审查。

  • Filter #3: Experience design: To apply this filter, take into account everything you know about creating a good experience, including aesthetics, interest curves, resonant theme, and game balancing. Many of the lenses in this book are about experience design—to pass this filter, your game must stand up to the scrutiny of many lenses.

  • 关键问题:“这是一个设计精良的游戏吗?”

  • Key Question: “Is this a well-designed game?”

  • 筛选条件 #4:创新:如果你正在设计一款新游戏,那么从定义上讲,游戏需要有新意,玩家以前从未见过的东西。你的游戏是否足够新颖是一个主观问题,但却非常重要。

  • Filter #4: Innovation: If you are designing a new game, by definition, there needs to be something new about it, something players haven’t seen before. Whether your game is novel enough is a subjective question, but a very important one.

  • 关键问题:“这个游戏够新颖吗?”

  • Key Question: “Is this game novel enough?”

  • 筛选条件 #5:商业和营销:游戏业务就是一门生意,想要销售游戏的设计师必须考虑现实情况,并将其融入游戏设计中。这涉及许多问题。主题和故事是否会吸引消费者?游戏是否易于解释,以至于人们只需查看概述就能了解游戏内容?基于该类型,消费者对这款游戏有何期望?这款游戏的功能与市场上其他类似游戏相比如何?制作这款游戏​​的成本是否会高到无法盈利?游戏的商业模式是否合理?这些问题和许多其他问题的答案会对您的设计产生影响。具有讽刺意味的是,通过这种过滤器来看,推动最初设计的创新想法可能完全站不住脚。这将在第32 章“利润”中详细讨论。

  • Filter #5: Business and marketing: The games business is a business, and designers who want their games to sell must consider the realities of this and integrate them into their game’s design. This involves many questions. Are the theme and story going to be appealing to consumers? Is the game so easily explainable that one can understand what it is about just by looking at the overview? What are the expectations consumers are going to have about this game based on the genre? How do the features of this game compare to other similar games in the marketplace? Will the cost of producing this game be so high as to make it unprofitable? Does the business model for the game make sense? The answers to these and many other questions are going to have an impact on your design. Ironically, the innovative idea that drove the initial design may prove to be completely untenable when viewed through this filter. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 32: Profit.

  • 关键问题:“这款游戏能盈利吗?”

  • Key Question: “Will this game be profitable?”

  • 过滤器 #6:工程:在构建游戏创意之前,游戏创意只是一个创意,创意不一定受制于可能性或实用性。要通过此过滤器,您必须回答以下问题:“我们将如何构建它?”答案可能是技术限制不允许按照最初设想构建创意。新手设计师经常因工程对其设计的限制而感到沮丧。但是,工程过滤器同样可以向新的方向发展游戏,因为在应用此过滤器的过程中,您可能会意识到工程为您的游戏带来了最初没有想到的功能。在应用此过滤器期间出现的想法可能特别有价值,因为您可以确定它们是实用的。第29 章技术将讨论更多有关工程和技术的问题。

  • Filter #6: Engineering: Until you have built it, a game idea is just an idea, and ideas are not necessarily bound by the constraints of what is possible or practical. To pass this filter, you have to answer the question, “How are we going to build this?” The answer may be that the limits of technology do not permit the idea as originally envisioned to be constructed. Novice designers often grow frustrated with the limits that engineering imposes on their designs. However, the engineering filter can just as often grow a game in new directions, because in the process of applying this filter, you may realize that engineering makes possible features for your game that did not initially occur to you. The ideas that appear during the application of this filter can be particularly valuable, since you can be certain that they are practical. More issues of engineering and technology will be discussed in Chapter 29: Technology.

  • 关键问题:“从技术上来说,开发这个游戏可行吗?”

  • Key Question: “Is it technically possible to build this game?”

  • 过滤器 #7:社交/社区:有时,游戏仅仅有趣是不够的。一些设计目标可能需要强大的社交组件、强大的病毒式传播组件或围绕游戏形成一个蓬勃发展的社区。游戏的设计将对这些方面产生重大影响。这将在第 24 章和第 25章中详细讨论。

  • Filter #7: Social/Community: Sometimes, it is not enough for a game to be fun. Some of the design goals may require a strong social component, a strong viral component, or the formation of a thriving community around your game. The design of your game will have a strong impact on these things. This will be discussed in detail in Chapters 24 and 25.

  • 关键问题:“这个游戏是否符合我们的社交和社区目标?”

  • Key Question: “Does this game meet our social and community goals?”

  • 过滤器 #8:游戏测试:一旦游戏开发到可玩的阶段,您必须应用游戏测试过滤器,这可以说是所有过滤器中最重要的一个。想象玩游戏的感觉是一回事,实际玩游戏又是另一回事,而看到目标受众玩它又是另一回事。您将希望尽快将游戏推向可玩阶段,因为当您真正看到游戏运行时,必须进行的重要更改将变得显而易见。除了修改游戏本身之外,当您开始更多地了解游戏机制和目标受众的心理时,此过滤器的应用通常还会改变和调整其他过滤器。第28 章将详细讨论游戏测试。

  • Filter #8: Playtesting: Once the game has been developed to the point that it is playable, you must apply the playtesting filter, which is arguably the most important of all the filters. It is one thing to imagine what playing a game will be like, and quite another to actually play it, and yet another to see it played by your target audience. You will want to get your game to a playable stage as soon as possible, because when you actually see your game in action, important changes that must be made will become obvious. In addition to modifying the game itself, the application of this filter often changes and tunes the other filters as you start to learn more about your game mechanics and the psychology of your intended audience. Playtesting will be discussed in detail in Chapter 28.

  • 关键问题:“游戏测试员是否足够喜欢这个游戏?”

  • Key Question: “Do the playtesters enjoy the game enough?”

有时,在设计过程中,您可能会发现需要更改其中一个过滤器——也许您最初针对的是某个人群(例如,18-35 岁的男性),但在设计过程中,您偶然发现了更适合另一个人群(例如,50 岁以上的女性)的过滤器。当您的设计约束允许时,更改过滤器是可以的。重要的是,通过更改过滤器或更改设计,您可以找到一种方法来满足所有八个条件。

Sometimes, in the course of design, you may find a need to change one of the filters—perhaps originally you targeted one demographic (say, males ages 18–35), but while designing, you stumbled into something that better fits another demographic (say, females over 50). Changing the filters is fine, when your design constraints will allow it. The important thing is that somehow, by changing the filters or by changing your design, you find a way to get through all eight.

您将在游戏的其余设计和开发过程中不断使用这些过滤器。在挑选初始想法时,有必要评估哪些想法最有可能被塑造和实现。塑造到可以经受住这种考验的程度。八个过滤器的视角是评估你的游戏的一个非常有用的方法,所以让我们把它作为镜头#15

You will be using these filters continuously throughout the rest of the design and development process of your game. When picking an initial idea, it makes sense to evaluate which of your ideas is going to have the best shot of being molded and shaped to the point it can survive this gauntlet. The perspective of the eight filters is a very useful way to evaluate your game, so let’s make it Lens #15.

循环规则

The Rule of the Loop

让人有些畏惧的是,第 7 章和本章的第一部分只是对“(1)想出一个想法”的阐述。另一方面,想法是设计的根源,而想法的产生是如此神秘,几乎像是魔术,所以也许我们不应该惊讶于这一步有这么多话要说。

It is somewhat daunting to consider that all of Chapter 7 and the first part of this one have merely been an elaboration of “(1) Think of an idea.” On the other hand, ideas are at the root of design, and their production is so mysterious as to be almost magical, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that there is so much to say about this single step.

到了这一步,你已经想出了很多点子,并选定了一个,现在是时候进入下一步了:“(2) 尝试一下”。许多设计师和开发者就是这么做的——直接开始尝试他们的游戏。如果你的游戏很简单——比如纸牌游戏、棋盘游戏或非常简单的电脑游戏——而且你有足够的时间反复测试和修改,直到它变得很棒,那么你可能就应该这么做。

At this point in the process, you have thought of many ideas and chosen one, and now it is time to move on to the next step: “(2) Try it out.” And many designers and developers do just that—leap in and try out their game. And if your game is simple—such as a card game, board game, or very simple computer game—and you have plenty of time to test it and change it, over and over, until it is great, you probably should do just that.

但是,如果你无法在一两个小时内构建出一个可行的游戏原型,该怎么办?如果你的游戏构想需要数月的艺术创作和编程,你才能试用它,该怎么办?如果是这种情况(许多现代电子游戏设计都是如此),此时你需要谨慎行事。游戏设计和开发的过程必然是迭代或循环的。不可能准确规划你的游戏通过所有八个过滤器并“足够好”之前需要真正进行多少次循环。这就是游戏开发如此冒险的原因——你是在赌博,你能够让你的游戏在固定的预算下通过所有八个过滤器,但你真的不知道这是否有可能。

But what if you can’t just build a working prototype of your game in an hour or two? What if your game vision requires months of artwork and programming before you will even be able to try it out? If this is the case (as it is for many modern videogame designs), you need to proceed cautiously at this point. The process of game design and development is necessarily iterative, or looping. It is impossible to accurately plan how many loops it is really going to take before your game passes all eight filters and is “good enough.” This is what makes game development so incredibly risky—you are gambling that you will be able to get your game to pass all eight filters on a fixed budget, when you really don’t know if that will be possible.

许多人至今仍在使用一种幼稚的策略,即开始匆忙制作游戏并希望获得最佳效果。有时这种方法有效。但如果不成功,你就会陷入可怕的困境。你要么必须发布一款你知道不够好的游戏,要么承受继续开发直到它足够好的代价。而且通常,这些额外的时间和费用足以让项目完全无利可图。

The naïve strategy, which many still use today, is to start slapping the game together and hope for the best. Sometimes this works. But when it doesn’t, you are in a horrible mess. You either have to ship a game that you know isn’t good enough or suffer the expense of continuing development until it is. And often, this extra time and expense is enough to make the project completely unprofitable.

事实上,这是所有软件项目都面临的问题。软件项目非常复杂,很难预测需要多长时间才能完成构建,以及需要多长时间才能找到并修复开发过程中必然会出现的所有错误。除此之外,游戏还需要有趣的额外负担——游戏开发者有几个额外的过滤器,非游戏软件开发者则无需担心。

In truth, this is a problem for all software projects. Software projects are so complex that it is very difficult to predict how long they will take to build and how long it will take to find and fix all of the bugs that will surely appear during development. On top of all that, games have the added burden of needing to be fun—game developers have a couple of extra filters that nongame software developers don’t need to worry about.

这里真正的问题是循环规则。

The real problem here is the Rule of the Loop.

循环规则:测试和改进设计的次数越多,您的游戏就会越好。

The Rule of the Loop: The more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be.

循环规则不是镜头,因为它不是一种视角——它是绝对的真理。循环规则没有例外。在你的职业生涯中,你会不时地试图将其合理化,说服自己“这次,设计太好了,我们不必测试和改进”,或者“我们真的别无选择——我们只能希望得到最好的结果”,而你每次都会为此受苦。电脑游戏的可怕之处在于,测试和调整系统所需的时间和金钱比传统游戏多得多。这意味着电脑游戏开发者别无选择,只能减少循环次数,而这是一件非常冒险的事情。

The Rule of the Loop is not a lens, because it is not a perspective—it is an absolute truth. There are no exceptions to the Rule of the Loop. You will try, at times in your career, to rationalize it away, to convince yourself that “this time, the design is so good, we don’t have to test and improve,” or “we really have no choice—we’ll have to hope for the best,” and you will suffer for it each time. The horrible thing about computer games is that the amount of time and money it takes to test and adjust the system is so much greater than for traditional games. It means computer game developers have no choice but to loop fewer times, which is a terribly risky thing to do.

如果你确实着手设计一款可能涉及长期“测试和改进”循环的游戏,那么你需要回答以下两个问题:

If you are indeed embarking on the design of a game that is likely to involve long “test and improve” loops, you need to answer these two questions:

  • 循环问题 1:如何让每个循环都有意义?

  • Loop question 1: How can I make every loop count?

  • 循环问题2:如何才能尽可能快地循环?

  • Loop question 2: How can I loop as fast as possible?

过去四十年来,软件工程人员对这个问题进行了大量的思考,并提出了一些有用的技术。

The software engineering people have thought about this problem a lot over the last forty years, and they have come up with some useful techniques.

软件工程简史

A Short History of Software Engineering

危险—瀑布—保持距离

Danger—Waterfall—Keep Back

20 世纪 60 年代,软件开发还处于萌芽阶段,当时几乎没有正式的开发流程。程序员只能猜测开发需要多长时间,然后开始编码。但猜测往往是错误的,许多软件项目都严重超出预算。20 世纪 70 年代,为了给这个不可预测的过程带来一些秩序,许多开发人员(通常是在非技术管理人员的要求下)尝试采用软件开发的“瀑布模型”,这是一个有序的七步软件开发过程。它通常如下所示:

In the 1960s, when software development was still relatively new, there was very little in the way of formal process. Programmers just made their best guesses about how long things would take, and they would start coding. Often the guesses were wrong, and many software projects went disastrously over budget. In the 1970s, in an attempt to bring some order to this unpredictable process, many developers (usually at the behest of nontechnical management) tried to adopt the “waterfall model” of software development, which was an orderly seven-step process for software development. It was generally presented looking something like this:



8.2

FIGURE

8.2

它看起来确实很吸引人!七个有序的步骤,当每个步骤完成后,只需继续下一个步骤——“瀑布”这个名字本身就意味着不需要迭代,因为瀑布通常不会向上流动。

And it certainly looks appealing! Seven orderly steps, and when each is complete, nothing remains but to move on to the next one—the very name “waterfall” implies that no iteration is needed, since waterfalls generally do not flow uphill.

瀑布模型有一个优点:它鼓励开发人员在开始编写代码之前花更多时间进行规划和设计。除此之外,它完全是胡说八道,因为它违反了循环规则。经理们发现它非常有吸引力,但程序员知道它很荒谬——软件太复杂了,这种线性过程根本行不通。即使是 Winston Royce,他撰写了这篇论文,为这一切奠定了基础,但他不同意人们普遍理解的瀑布模型。有趣的是,他的原始论文强调了迭代的重要性以及根据需要返回到先前步骤的能力。他甚至从未使用过“瀑布”这个词!但各地大学和公司教授的都是这种线性方法。整个事情似乎都是一厢情愿的想法,主要是由那些实际上不必亲自构建真实系统的人所宣传的。

The waterfall model had one good quality: it encouraged developers to spend more time in planning and design before just jumping into the code. Except for that, it is complete nonsense, because it violates the Rule of the Loop. Managers found it incredibly appealing, but programmers knew it to be absurd—software is simply too complex for such a linear process to ever work. Even Winston Royce, who wrote the paper that was the foundation for all of this, disagreed with the waterfall model as it is commonly understood. Interestingly, his original paper emphasizes the importance of iteration and the ability to go back to previous steps as needed. He never even used the word “waterfall”! But what was taught at universities and corporations everywhere was this linear approach. The whole thing seems to have been wishful thinking, mostly promulgated by people who did not actually have to build real systems themselves.

巴里·博姆爱你

Barry Boehm Loves You

随后,1986 年,Barry Boehm(发音为“beam”)提出了另一种模型,该模型更接近于实际软件开发的实际情况。该模型通常以有点吓人的图表形式呈现,其中开发从中间开始,然后顺时针螺旋式展开,一次又一次地穿过四个象限(图 8.3)。

Then, in 1986, Barry Boehm (pronounced “beam”) presented a different model, which was based more closely on how real software development actually happens. It is usually presented as a somewhat intimidating diagram, where development starts in the middle and spirals out clockwise, passing through four quadrants again and again (Figure 8.3).



8.3

FIGURE

8.3

软件开发的螺旋模型。

The spiral model of software development.

他的模型有很多复杂的细节,但我们不需要全部讲清楚。这里基本上有三个很棒的想法:风险评估、原型和循环。简而言之,螺旋模型建议您执行以下操作:

His model has a lot of complex detail, but we don’t need to go into all of that. There are basically three great ideas wrapped up in here: risk assessment, prototypes, and looping. In brief, the spiral model suggests that you do the following:

  1. 提出一个基本的设计。

  2. Come up with a basic design.

  3. 找出设计中最大的风险。

  4. Figure out the greatest risks in your design.

  5. 构建可以减轻这些风险的原型。

  6. Build prototypes that mitigate those risks.

  7. 测试原型。

  8. Test the prototypes.

  9. 根据您所学到的知识提出更详细的设计。

  10. Come up with a more detailed design based on what you have learned.

  11. 返回步骤2。

  12. Return to step 2.

基本上,你要重复这个循环,直到系统完成。这毫无疑问胜过瀑布模型,因为它完全是关于循环规则的。此外,它回答了我们之前提出的问题:

And basically, you repeat this loop until the system is done. This beats the waterfall model hands down, because it is all about the Rule of the Loop. Also, it answers the questions we stated earlier:

  • 循环问题 1:如何让每个循环都有意义?

    螺旋模型答案:评估您的风险并减轻其影响。

  • Loop question 1: How can I make every loop count?

    Spiral model answer: Assess your risks and mitigate them.

  • 循环问题2:如何才能尽可能快地循环?

    螺旋模型答案:构建许多粗略的原型。

  • Loop question 2: How can I loop as fast as possible?

    Spiral model answer: Build many rough prototypes.

螺旋模型有很多后代,但迄今为止最成功的是敏捷开发的传播。

There have been many descendants of the spiral model, but by far the most successful has been the spread of agile development.

敏捷宣言

The Agile Manifesto

对现代游戏设计和开发影响最大的事件发生在 2001 年犹他州雪鸟市的一个滑雪胜地,当时一群软件工程师制定了《敏捷宣言》。他们延续了 Barry Boehm 的风格,试图提出创建优秀软件背后的价值观和原则。该宣言及其 12 条关键原则全文转载如下:

The event that most shaped modern game design and development occurred in 2001 at a ski resort in Snowbird, Utah, when a group of software engineers put together the Agile Manifesto. Continuing in the vein of Barry Boehm, they attempted to put forth the values and principles that were behind the creation of excellent software. The manifesto and its 12 key principles are reprinted in full here:

个人和互动高于流程和工具

可工作的软件优于详尽的文档

客户合作优于合同谈判

响应变化而非遵循计划

也就是说,虽然物品有价值

右边,我们更重视左边的项目。

我们遵循以下原则:

  1. 我们的最高优先级是通过尽早并持续交付有价值的软件来让客户满意。

  2. 欢迎更改需求,即使是在开发后期。敏捷流程可以利用变化来提高客户的竞争优势。

  3. 频繁地交付可用的软件,从几周到几个月不等,最好是较短的时间范围。

  4. 在整个项目过程中,业务人员和开发人员必须每天一起工作。

  5. 围绕积极进取的个人开展项目。为他们提供所需的环境和支持,并相信他们能够完成工作。

  6. 向开发团队传达信息的最有效方法是面对面交谈。

  7. 可工作的软件是衡量进度的主要标准。

  8. 敏捷流程促进可持续发展。发起人、开发人员和用户应该能够无限期地保持恒定的步伐。

  9. 持续关注技术卓越性和良好设计可提高敏捷性。

  10. 简单——最大限度地减少未完成工作量的艺术——至关重要。

  11. 最好的架构、需求和设计源自自组织团队。

  12. 团队会定期反思如何提高效率,然后相应地调整其行为。

Individuals and Interactions -over- Processes and Tools

Working Software -over- Comprehensive Documentation

Customer Collaboration -over- Contract Negotiation

Responding to Change -over- Following a Plan

That is, while there is value in the items on

the right, we value the items on the left more.

We follow these principles:

  1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

  2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

  3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

  4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

  5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

  6. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

  7. Working software is the primary measure of progress.

  8. Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

  9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

  10. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.

  11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

  12. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

这些原则已被转化为具体实践,形式和名称各异,但最常被称为“scrum”。敏捷和 scrum 对软件世界产生了巨大影响,对电子游戏开发者的影响更大,他们尤其热衷于拥抱这些原则。我的观察是,目前超过 80% 的电子游戏开发者声称正在使用某种版本的敏捷开发。看看敏捷开发的性质,不难看出原因。

These principles have been translated into concrete practices that take many forms and names but are most often referred to as “scrum.” Agile and scrum made a huge impact on the software world and a bigger impact on videogame developers, who have been especially passionate about embracing these principles. My observations are that at this point in time, over 80% of videogame developers claim to be using some version of agile development. Looking at the nature of agile development, it’s not hard to see why.

敏捷方法和流程的完整描述超出了本书的范围,但以下是大多数开发人员使用的核心元素:

A full description of agile methods and processes is beyond the scope of this book, but here are the core elements used by most developers:

  • 灵活的目标:敏捷理念的核心是,我们无法准确知道我们将有时间创造什么。通过围绕一组更灵活的目标进行规划,而不仅仅是容忍计划的变化,而是为计划的变化进行规划,团队可以在整个开发过程中适应新的想法和信息。

  • Flexible goals: Central to the agile philosophy is the notion that we can’t know precisely what we are going to have time to create. By planning around a more flexible set of goals, and not merely tolerating changes to the plan, but planning for changes to the plan, the team can adapt to new ideas and information throughout the course of development.

  • 优先待办事项:敏捷团队不会按照固定的一组功能进行工作,而是使用待办事项,即按优先级排序的功能列表。任何时候,有人对某个功能有新想法,都可以将其添加到待办事项中。在每个冲刺中,团队都会重新审视待办事项并重新确定功能的优先级——重要的功能排名靠前,不太重要的功能排名靠后。这样可以轻松决定下一步要做什么——只需查看待办事项的顶部即可。重要的是要认识到,没有人能保证积压的所有事情都会完成,只能保证最重要的事情会利用可用的时间来完成。

  • Prioritized backlog: Instead of working toward a rigid set of features, agile teams instead work with a backlog, which is a list of features sorted by priority. Anytime someone has a new idea for a feature, it can be added to the backlog. In each sprint, the team revisits the backlog and reprioritizes the features—important ones get a high ranking, less important ones get a low ranking. This makes it easy to decide what to work on next—just look at the top of the backlog. It is important to realize that there is no guarantee that everything on the backlog will get done—there is only guarantee that the most important things will get done with whatever time is available.

  • 冲刺:敏捷开发人员不会主要关注长期(数月)目标,而是进行一系列“冲刺”,每个冲刺持续数周,并在结束时提供具体的工作成果。Atari 创始人 Nolan Bushnell 曾说过:“最终的灵感来自截止日期”,这是真的——截止日期有一种特殊的方式来实现事情,这正是冲刺背后的哲学:截止日期越多,完成的事情就越多。

  • Sprints: Instead of focusing primarily on working toward a long-term (multimonth) goal, agile developers work in a series of “sprints,” where each sprint is a few weeks long and has a concrete working deliverable at the end of it. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell once said, “The ultimate inspiration is the deadline,” and it is true—deadlines have a special way of making things happen, and that is precisely the philosophy behind sprinting: more deadlines means more things get done.

  • Scrum 会议:敏捷开发人员不每周召开“状态会议”,而是每天召开“scrum”会议,旨在简洁高效。这些会议通常持续 10-15 分钟,并且经常站着开会,以强调其简短性。在这些会议期间,每个成员只解释三件事:他们昨天完成了什么、他们计划今天完成什么以及他们面临的问题。会议结束后,相应的团队成员将一对一讨论这些问题的解决方案。在这种系统中,每个团队成员都知道其他人在做什么,并有机会从团队成员那里获得帮助。

  • Scrum meetings: Instead of weekly “status meetings,” agile developers have daily “scrum” meetings, designed for brevity and effectiveness. These meetings are typically 10–15 minutes long and are often held standing up, to underline their brief nature. During these meetings, each member explains exactly three things and nothing more: what they accomplished yesterday, what they plan to accomplish today, and what problems they are facing. Solutions to these problems are discussed one-on-one by the appropriate team members after the meeting is over. In this system, each team member stays aware of what the others are doing and gives them a chance to get help from team members.

  • 演示日:每次冲刺结束时,每个人都会聚在一起,面对面地查看和试验所生产的产品。根据这一新基准,团队会进行风险分析,并共同规划下一个冲刺。

  • Demo day: At the end of each sprint, everyone gets together, face to face, to see and experiment with what was produced. Working from this new baseline, the team does risk analysis and works together to plan the next sprint.

  • 回顾:同样,在每个冲刺结束时,团队都会举行一次“回顾”会议,会议内容不是他们正在开发的产品,而是他们正在使用的流程。这是一个让团队讨论他们做对了什么、做错了什么以及如何为下一个冲刺调整流程的机会。

  • Retrospectives: Also at the end of each sprint, the team has a “retrospective” meeting, which is not about the product they are working on, but rather about the process they are using. This is a chance for the team to discuss what they are doing right, what they are doing wrong, and how they should adjust their process for the next sprint.

重要的是要记住,敏捷是一种哲学,而不是一种规定的方法,不同的开发人员在实施敏捷方法时会有一些显著的差异。虽然这些方法各有不同,但它们都旨在创建尽可能多的循环,并使每个循环都发挥作用。必然地,所有方法的核心都是风险评估和原型设计。

It is important to keep in mind that agile is a philosophy, not a prescribed methodology, and that there is some significant variety in the way different developers carry it out. While these approaches have their differences, they are all designed to create as many loops as possible and to make each loop count. Necessarily, all feature risk assessment and prototyping at their core.

风险评估和原型设计

Risk Assessment and Prototyping

例如:泡泡镇的囚徒

Example: Prisoners of Bubbleville

假设你和你的团队决定制作一款关于跳伞进入城市的电子游戏。你有一个基于元素四元组的简短设计描述:

Let’s say you and your team have decided you want to make a videogame all about parachuting into a city. You have a brief design description that you based on the elemental tetrad:

泡泡城的囚徒:设计概要
  • 故事:你是一只会跳伞的猫“Smiley”。泡泡镇的善良人民被邪恶的巫师困在了家中。你必须找到一种方法来打败巫师,方法是反复跳伞进入城市,从烟囱滑下,拜访市民,获取有关如何阻止巫师的线索。

  • Story: You are “Smiley,” a parachuting cat. The good people of Bubbleville are trapped in their houses by an evil wizard. You must find a way to defeat the wizard, by repeatedly parachuting into the city and sliding down chimneys to visit the citizens and get clues about how to stop the wizard.

  • 机制:当你跳伞降落到城市时,你要抓住从城市升起的魔法泡泡,并利用泡泡的能量向邪恶的秃鹫发射射线,因为秃鹫会试图戳破泡泡并撕破你的降落伞。同时,你必须导航到城市中的几座目标建筑之一。

  • Mechanics: As you parachute toward the city, you are trying to grab magic bubbles that rise up from the city and use their energy to shoot rays at evil vultures that try to pop the bubbles and rip your parachute. Simultaneously, you must navigate down to one of several target buildings in the city.

  • 美学:卡通的外观和感觉。

  • Aesthetics: A cartoony look and feel.

  • 技术:使用第三方引擎的多平台 3D 控制台游戏。

  • Technology: Multiple platform 3D console game using a third-party engine.

你可以采取的一种方法是直接开始构建游戏。开始编写代码、设计详细的关卡和制作角色动画,同时等待所有东西组合在一起,看看最终效果如何。但这可能非常危险。假设这是一个为期 18 个月的项目,那么可能需要长达六个月的时间才能进行游戏测试。如果那时你发现你的游戏创意并不有趣,或者你的游戏引擎无法胜任,那该怎么办?那你就麻烦大了。你只完成了项目的三分之一,却只完成了一个循环!

One approach you could take would be to just start building the game. Start writing code, designing detailed levels, and animating the characters, while you wait for it all to come together, to see what it will really be like. But this could be incredibly dangerous. Assuming this is an eighteen-month project, it might take as long as six months before you even have anything you can playtest. What if you learned, at that point, that your game idea wasn’t fun? Or your game engine wasn’t up to the job? You would be in real trouble. You would be one-third of the way through the project and would only have completed a single loop!

相反,正确的做法是与你的团队坐下来进行风险分析。这意味着列出所有可能危及项目的事情。这款游戏的示例清单可能如下:

Instead, the right thing is to sit down with your team and do a risk analysis. This means making a list of all the things that might jeopardize the project. A sample list for this game might be the following:

泡泡镇的囚徒:风险清单
  • 风险#1收集泡泡/射击秃鹫的机制可能并不像我们想象的那么有趣。

  • Risk #1: The bubble collecting/vulture shooting mechanic might not be as fun as we think.

  • 风险#2游戏引擎可能无法同时绘制整个城市以及所有的气泡和秃鹫。

  • Risk #2: The game engine might not be able to handle drawing an entire city and all those bubbles and vultures at once.

  • 风险#3我们目前的想法是,我们需要三十个不同的房子来制作一款完整的游戏——创造所有不同的内部装饰和动画角色可能比我们所拥有的花费更多的时间。

  • Risk #3: Our current thinking is that we need thirty different houses to make a full game—creating all the different interiors and animated characters might take more time than we have.

  • 风险#4我们不确定人们是否会喜欢我们的角色和故事。

  • Risk #4: We aren’t sure people will like our characters and story.

  • 风险#5出版商可能会坚持让我们将这款游戏的主题改为一部有关特技跳伞的夏季新电影。

  • Risk #5: There is a chance the publisher might insist we theme this game to a new summer movie about stunt parachuting.

实际上,您可能会面临更多风险,但为了便于举例,我们仅考虑这些风险。那么,您会如何应对这些风险呢?您可以祈祷这些事情不会发生,或者您可以采取明智的措施:降低风险。这样做的目的是尽快降低或消除风险,通常是通过构建小型原型。让我们看看如何降低这些风险:

In reality, you will probably have many more risks, but for the sake of our example, we’ll just consider these. So what do you do about these risks? You could just cross your fingers and hope these things don’t happen, or you could do the smart thing: risk mitigation. The idea is to reduce or eliminate the risks as soon as possible, often by building small prototypes. Let’s look at how each of these risks could be mitigated:

泡沫城的囚徒:风险缓解
  • 风险#1收集泡泡/射击秃鹫的机制可能并不像我们想象的那么有趣。

    游戏机制通常可以抽象化并以更简单的形式进行。让程序员制作一个非常抽象的游戏机制版本,也许是 2D 版本,使用简单的几何形状而不是动画角色。您可能可以在一两周内制作出一款可运行的游戏,并立即开始回答有关它是否有趣的问题。如果不是,您可以对简单原型进行快速修改,直到它变得有趣,然后开始制作精致的 3D 版本。您将更快地进行更多循环,明智地利用循环规则。您可能会反对这种方法,认为丢弃玩家永远不会看到的 2D 原型代码是一种浪费。但从长远来看,您会节省时间,因为您将更快地编写正确的游戏,而不是无休止地编写和重新编写错误的游戏。

  • Risk #1: The bubble collecting/vulture shooting mechanic might not be as fun as we think.

    Game mechanics can often be abstracted and played in a simpler form. Have a programmer make a very abstract version of this gameplay mechanic, perhaps in 2D, with simple geometric shapes instead of animated characters. You can probably have a working game in a week or two and start answering questions about whether it is fun right away. If it isn’t, you can make quick modifications to the simple prototype, until it is fun, and then begin work on the elaborate 3D version. You’ll be doing more loops sooner, wisely taking advantage of the Rule of the Loop. You might object to this approach, thinking that throwing out the 2D prototyping code, which the players will never see, is wasteful. In the long run, though, you would have saved time, because you will be coding the right game sooner and not endlessly coding and recoding the wrong game.

  • 风险#2游戏引擎可能无法同时绘制整个城市以及所有的气泡和秃鹫。

    如果你等到所有最终的艺术作品完成后再回答这个问题,你可能会陷入一个可怕的境地:如果游戏引擎无法处理,你现在必须要求艺术家重做他们的工作,以减轻游戏引擎的压力,或者要求程序员花费额外的时间尝试寻找技巧来更有效地渲染所有内容(或者最有可能的是,这两件事都要做)。为了降低风险,立即构建一个快速原型,它什么也不做,只是在屏幕上显示等效项目的大致数量,看看引擎是否可以处理它。这个原型没有游戏玩法;它纯粹是为了测试技术极限。如果它可以处理,那就太好了!如果不能,你可以在生成任何艺术作品之前找到解决方案。同样,这个原型将是一次性的。

  • Risk #2: The game engine might not be able to handle drawing an entire city and all those bubbles and vultures at once.

    If you wait for all the final artwork to answer this question, you could put yourself in a horrible situation: if the game engine can’t handle it, you now have to ask the artists to redo their work so it is less strain on the game engine or ask the programmers to spend extra time trying to find tricks to render everything more efficiently (or most likely, both of these things). To mitigate the risk, build a quick prototype, right away, that does nothing but show the approximate number of equivalent items on screen, to see if the engine can handle it. This prototype has no gameplay; it is purely to test technical limits. If it can handle it, great! If it can’t, you can figure out a solution now, before any art has been generated. Again, this prototype will be a throwaway.

  • 风险 #3我们目前的想法是,我们需要 30 栋不同的房屋来制作一款完整的游戏——创建所有不同的内部装饰和动画角色可能比我们所拥有的花费更多的时间。

    如果在开发进行到一半时才意识到自己没有足够的资源来制作所有艺术作品,那你就注定要失败。立即让艺术家创作一栋房子和一个动画角色,看看需要多长时间,如果花费的时间超出了你的承受能力,就立即更改设计 — 也许你可以少建一些房子,或者你可以重复使用一些室内装饰和角色。

  • Risk #3: Our current thinking is that we need 30 different houses to make a full game—creating all the different interiors and animated characters might take more time than we have.

    If you get halfway into development before you realize that you don’t have the resources to build all the artwork, you are doomed. Have an artist create one house and one animated character immediately to see how long it takes, and if it takes longer than you can afford, change your design immediately—maybe you could have fewer houses, or maybe you could reuse some of the interiors and characters.

  • 风险#4我们不确定人们是否会喜欢我们的角色和故事。

    如果你真的担心这个问题,那么你不能等到角色和故事进入游戏后才知道。我们在这里构建什么样的原型?艺术原型——它甚至可能不在电脑上——只是一个公告板。让你的艺术家画一些概念艺术或制作角色和场景的测试渲染。创建一些展示故事进展的故事板。一旦你有了这些,就开始向人们展示它们(希望是你的目标人群)并评估他们的反应。弄清楚他们喜欢什么,不喜欢什么,以及原因。也许他们喜欢主角的外表,但讨厌他的态度。也许反派很刺激,但故事很无聊。你可以完全独立于游戏来弄清楚大部分内容。每次你这样做并做出改变时,你就完成了另一个循环,并且离制作一款好游戏更近了一步。

  • Risk #4: We aren’t sure people will like our characters and story.

    If you really are concerned about this, you cannot wait until the characters and story are in the game to find out. What kind of prototype do we build here? An art prototype—it might not even be on a computer—just a bulletin board. Have your artists draw some concept art or produce test renders of your characters and settings. Create some storyboards that show how the story progresses. Once you have these, start showing them to people (hopefully people in your target demographic) and gauge their reactions. Figure out what they like, don’t like, and why. Maybe they like the look of the main character but hate his attitude. Maybe the villain is exciting, but the story is boring. You can figure most of this out completely independent of the game. Each time you do this and make a change, you’ve completed another loop and gotten one step closer to making a good game.

  • 风险#5我们有可能要将这款游戏的主题设定为一部有关特技跳伞的夏季新电影。

    这种风险听起来可能很荒谬,但这种事情总是会发生。当它发生在项目中期时,后果可能非常可怕。你不能忽视这种事情——你必须认真考虑可能威胁到你的项目的每一个风险。在这种情况下,原型会有帮助吗?可能不会。为了降低这种风险,你可以依靠管理层尽快做出决定,或者你可以决定制作一款更容易改编成电影主题的游戏。你甚至可以想出制作两款不同游戏的计划——关键是你要立即考虑风险并立即采取行动,以确保它不会危及你的游戏。

    风险缓解是一个非常有用的视角,它成为了镜头#16

  • Risk #5: There is a chance we might have to theme this game to a new summer movie about stunt parachuting.

    This risk might sound absurd, but this kind of thing happens all the time. When it happens in the middle of a project, it can be horrible. And you can’t ignore this kind of thing—you must seriously consider every risk that might threaten your project. Will a prototype help in this case? Probably not. To mitigate this risk, you can lean on management to get a decision as fast as possible, or you could decide to make a game that could more easily be rethemed to the movie. You might even come up with a plan for making two different games—the key idea is that you consider the risk immediately and take action now to make sure it doesn’t endanger your game.

    Risk mitigation is such a useful perspective to take that it becomes Lens #16.

高效原型设计的十个技巧

Ten Tips for Productive Prototyping

众所周知,快速原型设计对于高质量游戏开发至关重要。以下是一些技巧,可帮助您为游戏构建最佳、最有用的原型。

It is widely understood that rapid prototyping is crucial for quality game development. Here are some tips that will help you build the best, most useful prototypes for your game.

原型设计技巧1:回答问题

Prototyping Tip #1: Answer a Question

每个原型都应设计为回答一个问题,有时甚至不止一个。您应该能够清楚地陈述问题。如果您做不到,您的原型就有可能成为浪费时间的无用之物,而不是它本应成为的节省时间的实验。以下是原型可能回答的一些示例问题:

Every prototype should be designed to answer a question and sometimes more than one. You should be able to state the questions clearly. If you can’t, your prototype is in real danger of becoming a time-wasting boondoggle, instead of the time-saving experiment it is supposed to be. Here are some sample questions a prototype might answer:

  • 我们的技术在一个场景中可以支持多少个动画角色?

  • How many animated characters can our technology support in a scene?

  • 我们的核心玩法有趣吗?它能保持长久的趣味性吗?

  • Is our core gameplay fun? Does it stay fun for a long time?

  • 我们的角色和场景在美学上是否契合?

  • Do our characters and settings fit together well aesthetically?

  • 这个游戏的级别需要有多大?

  • How large does a level of this game need to be?

抵制过度构建原型的诱惑,只集中精力让它回答关键问题。

Resist the temptation to overbuild your prototype, and focus only on making it answer the key question.

原型设计技巧2:忘记质量

Prototyping Tip #2: Forget Quality

各种游戏开发者都有一个共同点:他们为自己的技艺感到自豪。因此,自然而然,许多人对制作“草率而粗糙”的原型的想法深恶痛绝。艺术家会在早期概念草图上花费太多时间,而程序员则会在好的软件工程上花费太多时间,而只为写出一段一次性代码。在开发原型时,最重要的是它是否能回答问题。它越快回答问题越好,即使它勉强能工作,看起来粗糙不堪。事实上,完善原型甚至可能让事情变得更糟。游戏测试员(和同事)更有可能指出粗糙的东西的问题,而不是看起来精致的东西。由于您的目标是立即发现问题,以便尽早解决问题,因此精致的原型实际上可能会通过隐藏真正的问题来使您的目标落空,从而使您陷入虚假的安全感。

Game developers of every stripe have one thing in common: they are proud of their craft. Naturally, then, many find the idea of doing a “quick and dirty” prototype completely abhorrent. Artists will spend too much time on early concept sketches—programmers will spend too much time on good software engineering for a piece of throwaway code. When working on a prototype, all that matters is whether it answers the question. The faster it can do that, the better—even if it just barely works and looks rough around the edges. In fact, polishing your prototype may even make things worse. Playtesters (and colleagues) are more likely to point out problems with something that looks rough than with something that looks polished. Since your goal is to find problems immediately so you can solve them early, a polished prototype can actually defeat your purpose by hiding real problems, thus lulling you into a false sense of security.

循环规则是绕不过去的。你越快构建出能回答你问题的原型,效果就越好,尽管它看起来可能很丑陋。

There is no getting around the Rule of the Loop. The faster you build the prototype that answers your question, the better, despite how ugly it may look.

原型设计技巧 3:不要执着

Prototyping Tip #3: Don’t Get Attached

《人月神话》中,弗雷德·布鲁克斯说过一句名言:“计划扔掉一个——你无论如何都会扔掉的。”他这句话的意思是,无论你喜欢还是不喜欢,不是,系统的第一个版本不会是一个成品,而是一个真正的原型,在以“正确”的方式构建系统之前,你需要丢弃它。但事实上,你可能会扔掉很多原型。缺乏经验的开发人员往往很难做到这一点——这会让他们觉得自己失败了。在开始原型设计工作时,你需要以这一切都是暂时的心态开始——重要的是回答问题。把每个原型都看作是一个学习机会——作为构建“真正”系统的练习。当然,你不会扔掉所有的东西——你会保留一些真正有用的小部件,然后将它们组合起来,创造出更伟大的东西。这可能会很痛苦。正如设计师 Nicole Epps 曾经说过的,“你必须学会​​如何切割你的婴儿。”

In The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks made the famous statement: “Plan to throw one away—you will anyway.” By this he means that whether you like it or not, the first version of your system is not going to be a finished product, but really a prototype that you will need to discard before you build the system the “right” way. But in truth, you may throw away many prototypes. Less experienced developers often have a hard time doing this—it makes them feel like they have failed. You need to enter the prototyping work with the mind-set that it is all temporary—all that matters is answering the question. Look at each prototype as a learning opportunity—as practice for when you build the “real” system. Of course, you won’t throw out everything—you’ll keep little pieces here and there that really work and you’ll combine them to make something greater. This can be painful. As designer Nicole Epps once put it, “You must learn how to cut up your babies.”

原型设计技巧#4:确定原型的优先级

Prototyping Tip #4: Prioritize Your Prototypes

当你列出风险清单时,你可能会意识到你需要几个原型来减轻你面临的所有风险。正确的做法是像敏捷开发人员那样对它们进行优先排序,这样你就可以先面对最大的风险。你还应该考虑依赖性——如果一个原型的结果有可能使其他原型变得毫无意义,那么“上游”原型绝对是你的最高优先级。

When you make your list of risks, you might realize that you need several prototypes to mitigate all the risks that you face. The right thing to do is to prioritize them like the agile developers do, so that you face the biggest risks first. You should also consider dependence—if the results of one prototype have the potential to make the other prototypes meaningless, the “upstream” prototype is definitely your highest priority.

原型设计技巧 #5:高效并行化原型

Prototyping Tip #5: Parallelize Prototypes Productively

获得更多循环的一个好方法是一次做多个循环。系统工程师制作原型来回答技术问题时,艺术家可以制作艺术原型,游戏脚本编写者可以制作游戏原型。拥有大量小型独立原型可以帮助您更快地回答更多问题。

One great way to get more loops in is to do more than one at a time. While the system engineers work on prototypes to answer technology questions, the artists can work on art prototypes, and the game scripters can work on gameplay prototypes. Having lots of small, independent prototypes can help you answer more questions faster.

原型设计技巧#6:不一定非要数字化

Prototyping Tip #6: It Doesn’t Have to Be Digital

您的目标是尽可能有用且频繁地循环。 因此,如果您可以做到这一点,为什么不直接把软件放在一边呢? 如果您很聪明,您可以将您精美的电子游戏创意原型化为简单的棋盘游戏,或者我们有时称之为纸质原型。 为什么要这样做? 因为您可以快速制作棋盘游戏,并且它们通常具有相同的游戏玩法。 这可以让您更快地发现问题 - 原型设计的大部分过程是寻找问题并找出解决方法,因此纸质原型设计可以真正节省时间。 如果您的游戏是回合制的,那么这将变得很容易。Toontown Online的回合制战斗系统是通过一个简单的棋盘游戏原型化的,这让我们可以仔细平衡多种类型的攻击和连击。 我们会在纸上或白板上记录生命值,并一遍又一遍地玩,增减规则,直到游戏看起来足够平衡,可以尝试编码。

Your goal is to loop as usefully and as frequently as possible. So if you can manage it, why not just get the software out of the way? If you are clever, you can prototype your fancy videogame idea as a simple board game, or what we sometimes call a paper prototype. Why do this? Because you can make board games fast and often capture the same gameplay. This lets you spot problems sooner—much of the process of prototyping is about looking for problems and figuring out how to fix them, so paper prototyping can be a real time saver. If your game is turn based to start with, this becomes easy. The turn-based combat system for Toontown Online was prototyped through a simple board game, which let us carefully balance the many types of attacks and combos. We would keep track of hit points on paper or on a whiteboard and play again and again, adding and subtracting rules until the game seemed balanced enough to try coding up.

即使是实时游戏也可以以纸质原型的形式来玩。有时它们可​​以转换为回合制模式,同时仍能捕捉游戏玩法。其他时候,您可以实时或近乎实时地玩它们。最好的方法是让其他人帮助您。我们将考虑两个例子。

Even real-time games can be played as paper prototypes. Sometimes they can be converted to a turn-based mode that still manages to capture the gameplay. Other times, you can just play them in real time or nearly. The best way to do it is to have other people help you. We’ll consider two examples.

俄罗斯方块:纸质原型

Tetris: A Paper Prototype

假设您想制作一个俄罗斯方块的纸质原型。您可以剪下一些小纸板碎片并将它们放在一堆中。让别人随机选择这些碎片并开始将它们从“板”(您在纸上绘制的草图)上滑下,同时您抓住它们并尝试将它们旋转到位。要完成一条线,您必须发挥想象力或暂停游戏,同时用 X-Acto 刀切割碎片。这不是完美的俄罗斯方块体验,但它可能足够接近,可以让您开始查看您是否拥有正确的形状,也足以让您了解碎片应该掉落的速度。您可以在大约十五分钟内完成整个过程。

Let’s say you wanted to make a paper prototype of Tetris. You could cut out little cardboard pieces and put them in a pile. Get someone else to choose them at random and start sliding them down the “board” (a sketch you’ve drawn on a piece of paper), while you grab them, and try to rotate them into place. To complete a line, you have to just use your imagination or pause the game while you cut the pieces with an X-Acto knife. This would not be the perfect Tetris experience, but it might be close enough for you to start to see if you had the right kinds of shapes and also enough to give you some sense of how fast the pieces should drop. And you could get the whole thing going in about fifteen minutes.

Halo:纸质原型

Halo: A Paper Prototype

有可能制作第一人称射击游戏的纸质原型吗?当然可以!你需要不同的人来扮演不同的游戏角色和不同的玩家。在一张大方格纸上画出地图,并获取代表不同玩家和敌人的小游戏棋子。你需要一个人来控制每个玩家,另一个人来控制每个敌人。然后,你可以制定一些回合制规则来决定如何移动和射击,或者给自己买一个节拍器!很容易找到免费的节拍器应用程序。将节拍器配置为每五秒滴答一次,并制定规则,即每次滴答你可以移动一个方格纸。当有视线时,你可以向另一个玩家或怪物射击,但每次滴答只能射击一次。这会给人一种以慢动作玩整个游戏的感觉,但这可能是一件好事,因为它让你有时间在玩游戏时思考哪些有效,哪些无效。您可以很好地了解地图应该有多大、走廊和房间的形状,这些形状构成了有趣的游戏,您的武器应该具备的属性,以及许多其他事情——而且您可以快速完成所有操作!

Would it be possible to make a paper prototype of a first-person shooter? Sure! You need different people to play the different game characters as well as different players. Draw out the map on a big piece of graph paper, and get little game pieces to represent the different players and enemies. You need one person to control each of the players and one for each of the enemies. You could then either make some turn-based rules about how to move and shoot or get yourself a metronome! It is easy to find free metronome apps. Configure your metronome to tick once every five seconds, and make a rule that you can move one square of graph paper with every tick. When there is a line of sight, you can take a shot at another player or monster, but only one shot per tick. This will give the feeling of playing the whole thing in slow motion, but that can be a good thing, because it gives you time to think about what is working and not working while you are playing the game. You can get a great sense of how big your map should be, the shapes of hallways and rooms that make for an interesting game, the properties your weapons should have, and many other things—and you can do it all lightning fast!

原型设计技巧 7:不必具有交互性

Prototyping Tip #7: It Doesn’t Have to Be Interactive

你的所有原型都不需要是数字化的;它们甚至不需要是交互式的。简单的草图和动画可以在很大程度上回答有关游戏玩法的问题。《波斯王子:时之刃》拥有新颖的跳跃和时间逆转机制,最初的原型纯粹是用令人难以置信的非交互式动画制作的设计师想象中的杂技,这样团队就可以更轻松地观察、思考和讨论如何创建实现这一愿景的交互式系统。

All your prototypes need not be digital; they don’t even need to be interactive. Simple sketches and animations can go a long way toward answering questions about gameplay. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, with its novel jumping and time-reversal mechanics, was originally prototyped purely with noninteractive animations of the incredible acrobatics the designers imagined, so the team could more easily look at, think about, and discuss how to create interactive systems that would achieve this vision.

原型设计技巧#8:选择“快速循环”游戏引擎

Prototyping Tip #8: Pick a “Fast Loop” Game Engine

传统的软件开发方法有点像烤面包:

The traditional method of software development is kind of like baking bread:

  1. 编写代码。

  2. Write code.

  3. 编译并链接。

  4. Compile and link.

  5. 运行你的游戏。

  6. Run your game.

  7. 在您的游戏中导航到您想要测试的部分。

  8. Navigate through your game to the part you want to test.

  9. 测试一下。

  10. Test it out.

  11. 返回步骤 1。

  12. Go back to step 1.

如果你不喜欢这个结果(你的测试结果),那么就别无选择,只能重新开始整个过程​​。这需要太长时间,尤其是对于大型游戏而言。通过选择具有正确脚本系统的引擎,你可以在游戏运行时更改代码。这让事情更像在粘土上工作——你可以不断地改变它们:

If you don’t like the bread (your test results), there is no choice but to start the whole process over again. It takes way too long, especially for a large game. By choosing an engine with the right kind of scripting system, you can make changes to your code while the game is running. This makes things more like working with clay—you can change them continuously:

  1. 运行你的游戏。

  2. Run your game.

  3. 在您的游戏中导航到您想要测试的部分。

  4. Navigate through your game to the part you want to test.

  5. 测试一下。

  6. Test it out.

  7. 编写代码。

  8. Write code.

  9. 返回步骤3。

  10. Go back to step 3.

通过在系统运行时重新编码,您可以每天获得更多循环,游戏质量也会相应提高。我过去曾使用 Scheme、Smalltalk 和 Python 来实现这一点,但任何后期绑定语言都可以完成这项工作。如今,Unity 引擎使用 JavaScript 或 C# 实现了这一点。而 Unreal 引擎则选择使用与 C++ 编程协同工作的拖放脚本系统 (Blueprints)。脚本语言的运行速度比 Assembly 和 C++ 等低级语言慢,但与通过对游戏进行更多迭代、充分利用循环规则而获得的巨大改进相比,这额外的计算时间只是杯水车薪。

By recoding your system while it is running, you can get in more loops per day, and the quality of your game goes up commensurately. I have used Scheme, Smalltalk, and Python for this in the past, but any late-binding language will do the job. Today, the Unity engine makes it possible with JavaScript or C#. The Unreal engine chooses instead to use a drag and drop scripting system (Blueprints) that works in concert with C++ programming. Scripting languages run more slowly than low-level languages like Assembly and C++, but this extra computing time is a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of improvement you will get by making many more iterations on your game, taking full advantage of the Rule of the Loop.

原型设计技巧#9:先制作玩具

Prototyping Tip #9: Build the Toy First

第 4 章中,我们区分了玩具和游戏。玩具本身很有趣。相比之下,游戏有目标,而且内容丰富得多。基于解决问题的经验。但我们永远不要忘记,许多游戏都是建立在玩具之上的。球是玩具,但棒球是游戏。跑跳的小人物是玩具,但大金刚是游戏。在围绕玩具设计游戏之前,你应该确保你的玩具好玩。你可能会发现,一旦你真正制作了玩具,你会对它的乐趣感到惊讶,游戏的全新创意可能会浮现在你眼前。

Back in Chapter 4, we distinguished between toys and games. Toys are fun to play with for their own sake. In contrast, games have goals and are a much richer experience based around problem solving. We should never forget, though, that many games are built on top of toys. A ball is a toy, but baseball is a game. A little avatar that runs and jumps is a toy, but Donkey Kong is a game. You should make sure that your toy is fun to play with before you design a game around it. You might find that once you actually build your toy, you are surprised by what makes it fun, and whole new ideas for games might become apparent to you.

游戏设计师戴维·琼斯说,在设计《旅鼠》游戏时,他的团队正是遵循了这种方法。他们认为,创造一个小世界,让许多小动物四处走动,做着不同的事情,会很有趣。他们不确定游戏会是什么样子,但这个世界听起来很有趣,所以他们就建造了它。一旦他们真的能玩到这个“玩具”,他们就开始认真讨论可以围绕它构建什么样的游戏。琼斯讲述了一个关于《侠盗猎车手》开发的类似故事:“ 《侠盗猎车手》并不是作为《侠盗猎车手》设计的。它被设计成一种媒介。它被设计成一个活生生、充满生机、好玩的城市。”一旦“媒介”开发出来,团队发现它是一个有趣的玩具,他们就必须决定用它来构建什么游戏。他们意识到这座城市就像一个迷宫,所以他们从他们知道的好东西中借用了迷宫游戏机制。琼斯解释说:“ 《侠盗猎车手》来自《吃豆人》。圆点是小人物。我坐在我的小黄色汽车里。鬼魂是警察。”

Game designer David Jones says that when designing the game Lemmings, his team followed exactly this method. They thought it would be fun to make a little world with lots of little creatures walking around doing different things. They weren’t sure what the game would be, but the world sounded fun, so they built it. Once they could actually play with the “toy,” they started talking seriously about what kinds of games could be built around it. Jones tells a similar story about the development of Grand Theft Auto: “Grand Theft Auto was not designed as Grand Theft Auto. It was designed as a medium. It was designed to be a living, breathing city that was fun to play.” Once the “medium” was developed and the team could see that it was a fun toy, they had to decide what game to build with it. They realized the city was like a maze, so they borrowed maze game mechanics from something they knew was good. Jones explains: “GTA came from Pac-Man. The dots are the little people. There’s me in my little, yellow car. And the ghosts are policemen.”

通过先制作玩具,然后再设计游戏,您可以大幅提高游戏的质量,因为它将在两个层面上充满乐趣。此外,如果您创建的游戏玩法基于玩具中最有趣的部分,那么这两个层面将以最强大的方式相互支持。游戏设计师经常忘记考虑玩具的视角。为了帮助我们记住,我们将其设为镜头 #17

By building the toy first and then coming up with the game, you can radically increase the quality of your game, because it will be fun on two levels. Further, if the gameplay you create is based on the parts of the toy that are the most fun, the two levels will be supporting each other in the strongest way possible. Game designers often forget to consider the toy perspective. To help us remember, we’ll make it Lens #17.

原型设计技巧 #10:抓住更多循环的机会

Prototyping Tip #10: Seize Opportunities for More Loops

随着游戏开发过程中事物的变化,有时会出现更多可用时间。游戏行业中一些最伟大的成功都来自于允许更多循环的意外事件。例如, Halo最初是作为 Macintosh 游戏开发的。当与微软达成协议意味着转向 PC 时,团队利用它作为一个机会抛弃了行不通的东西,并进一步迭代他们认为好的东西。当微软要求他们从 PC 转到新发布的 Xbox 时,他们获得了第二个意外收获!进行技术更改所需的额外时间也为迭代和改进游戏玩法提供了时间。由于设计师巧妙地利用了这些计划外的循环,游戏质量直线上升。

As things change in the course of game development, sometimes more time becomes available. Some of the greatest successes in the game industry have come from unexpected events allowing for more loops. Halo, for instance, was originally in development as a Macintosh game. When a deal with Microsoft meant a change to PC, the team used it as an opportunity to throw out things that weren’t working and to iterate further on what they knew was good. A second windfall came when Microsoft asked them to change from PC to the newly announced Xbox! The extra time necessary to make technical changes also afforded time to iterate and improve gameplay. Because the designers took savvy advantage of those unplanned loops, the quality of the game went through the roof.

闭环

Closing the Loop

构建原型后,剩下的就是测试它们,然后根据所学知识重新开始整个过程​​。回想一下我们之前讨论过的非正式过程:

Once you have built your prototypes, all that remains is to test them, and then based on what you have learned, start the whole process over again. Recall the informal process we discussed earlier:

非正式循环

The Informal Loop

  1. 想一个主意。

  2. Think of an idea.

  3. 试试看。

  4. Try it out.

  5. 继续修改和测试,直到看起来足够好为止。

  6. Keep changing it and testing it until it seems good enough.

现在我们让前面的循环更加正式一些:

We have now made the preceding loop a bit more formal:

正式循环

The Formal Loop

  1. 陈述问题。

  2. State the problem.

  3. 集思广益,找到一些可能的解决方案。

  4. Brainstorm some possible solutions.

  5. 选择一个解决方案。

  6. Choose a solution.

  7. 列出使用该解决方案的风险。

  8. List the risks of using that solution.

  9. 构建原型以降低风险。

  10. Build prototypes to mitigate the risks.

  11. 测试原型。如果它们足够好,就停止。

  12. Test the prototypes. If they are good enough, stop.

  13. 陈述您正在尝试解决的新问题,然后转到步骤2。

  14. State the new problems you are trying to solve, and go to step 2.

随着每一轮原型设计,你会发现自己在更详细地陈述问题。举个例子,假设你被赋予了创建赛车游戏的任务——但它必须有一些新颖和有趣的东西。以下是该过程的几个循环可能如何进行的总结。

With each round of prototyping, you will find yourself stating the problems in more detail. To give an example, let’s say you are given the task of creating a racing game—but there has to be something new and interesting about it. Here is a summary of how a few loops of that process might play out.

第 1 循环:“新赛车”游戏

Loop 1: “New Racing” Game

  • 问题陈述:想出一种新型的赛车游戏。

  • Problem statement: Come up with a new kind of racing game.

  • 解决方案:水下潜艇竞赛(使用鱼雷!)

  • Solution: Underwater submarine races (with torpedoes!)

  • 风险

    • 不确定水下赛道应该是什么样子。

    • 这可能感觉不够创新。

    • 技术可能无法处理所有的水效应。

  • Risks

    • Not sure what underwater racetracks should look like.

    • This might not feel innovative enough.

    • Technology might not be able to handle all the water effects.

  • 原型

    • 艺术家们正在绘制水下赛道的概念草图。

    • 设计师制作原型(使用纸质原型并破解现有的赛车游戏)实现新颖的效果(潜艇可以从水中升起并飞行、跟踪导弹、深水炸弹、穿越雷区)。

    • 程序员正在测试简单的水效果。

  • Prototypes

    • Artists working on concept sketches of underwater racetracks.

    • Designers prototyping (using paper prototypes and by hacking an existing racecar game) novel effects (subs that can also rise out of water and fly, tracking missiles, depth charges, racing through a minefield).

    • Programmers testing out simple water effects.

  • 结果

    • 如果水中有一条“发光的路径”,水下赛道看起来还不错。水下隧道会很酷!飞行潜艇沿着进出水面的轨道飞行也会很酷!

    • 早期的原型看起来很有趣,前提是潜艇速度非常快,机动性强。有必要将它们做成“竞速潜艇”。飞行和游泳的结合感觉很新奇。潜艇在飞行时应该速度更快,所以我们需要找到一种方法来限制它们在水下停留的时间。空中。我们所做的少量游戏测试表明,这款游戏必须支持联网多人游戏。

    • 有些水效果比其他效果更容易制作。水花飞溅效果很好,水下气泡也不错。让整个屏幕波动会占用太多 CPU,而且会分散注意力。

  • Results

    • Underwater racetracks look okay if there is a “glowing path” in the water. Underwater tunnels will be cool! So will flying submarines following tracks that go in and out of the water!

    • Early prototypes seem fun, provided the submarines are very fast and maneuverable. It will be necessary to make them “racing subs.” The mix of flying and swimming feels very novel. Subs should go faster when flying, so we will need to find a way to limit the amount of time they can spend in the air. The little playtesting we have done makes it clear this game must support networked multiplay.

    • Some water effects are easier than others. Splashes look good, so do underwater bubbles. Making the whole screen waver takes too much CPU and is kind of distracting anyway.

循环 2:“竞速潜艇”游戏

Loop 2: “Racing Subs” Game

  • 新的问题陈述:设计一款“竞速潜艇”游戏,潜艇可以飞行。

  • New problem statement: Design a “racing sub” game, where subs can fly.

  • 详细问题陈述

    • 不确定“竞速潜艇”是什么样子。我们需要定义潜艇和赛道的外观。

    • 需要找到一种平衡游戏的方法,以便潜艇在水中和水面上花费适当的时间。

    • 需要弄清楚如何支持网络多重播放。

  • Detailed problem statements

    • Not sure what “racing subs” look like. We need to define the look of both subs and racetracks.

    • Need to find a way to balance the game, so that subs spend the right amount of time in and out of the water.

    • Need to figure how to support networked multiplay.

  • 风险

    • 如果赛车潜艇看起来“太卡通”,它们可能会让老玩家望而却步。如果它们看起来太逼真,它们可能会在这种玩法下显得很傻。

    • 除非我们知道在水中和水面上花了多少时间,否则不可能设计关卡或为景观进行艺术创作。

    • 我们的团队从未为赛车游戏做过联网多人游戏。我们不确定我们能做到。

  • Risks

    • If the racing subs look “too cartoony,” they might turn off older players. If they look too realistic, they might just seem silly with this kind of gameplay.

    • Until we know how much time we are spending in and out of the water, it is impossible to design levels or to do the artwork for the landscapes.

    • The team has never done networked multiplay for a racing game. We aren’t completely sure we can do it.

  • 原型

    • 艺术家将绘制不同类型的潜艇,风格各异:卡通、写实、超写实的活生生的潜艇。团队将对它们进行投票,我们还会非正式地调查我们的目标受众。

    • 程序员和设计师将共同开发一个非常粗略的原型,让他们试验在水中和水面上应该花费多少时间,以及管理它的不同机制。

    • 程序员将构建一个用于网络多人游戏的粗略框架,该框架应当能够处理此类游戏所需的所有类型的消息。

  • Prototypes

    • Artists will sketch different kinds of subs, in a number of different styles: cartoony, realistic, hyperrealistic subs that are living creatures. The team will vote on them, and we will also informally survey members of our target audience.

    • Programmers and designers will work together on a very crude prototype that lets them experiment with how much time should be spent in and out of the water and different mechanics for managing that.

    • Programmers will build a rough framework for networked multiplay that should handle all the kinds of messages this kind of game will need.

  • 结果

    • 每个人都喜欢“恐龙潜艇”的设计。团队成员和潜在观众一致认为,“游泳的恐龙”才是这款游戏的正确外观和感觉。

    • 经过多次实验后,很明显,对于大多数关卡来说,60% 的时间应该花在水下,20% 的时间在空中,20% 的时间在水面附近,其中抓住正确的能量提升的玩家可以在水面上飞行以获得速度优势。

    • 早期的网络实验表明,大多数情况下,竞赛对于多人游戏来说不是问题,但如果我们能够避免使用速射机枪,多人游戏就会容易得多。

  • Results

    • Everyone loves the “dino-sub” designs. There is strong agreement between team members and potential audience members that “swimming dinosaurs” are the right look and feel for this game.

    • After several experiments, it becomes clear that for most levels, 60% of time should be spent underwater, 20% in the air, and 20% near the surface, where players who grab the right power-ups can fly above the water for a speed advantage.

    • The early networked experiments show that mostly the racing is not a problem for multiplay, but if we can avoid using rapid-fire machine guns, multiplay will be a lot easier.

循环 3:“飞行恐龙”游戏

Loop 3: “Flying Dinos” Game

  • 问题陈述:设计一款“飞行恐龙”游戏,让恐龙在水中和水上奔跑。

  • Problem statement: Design a “flying dino” game where dinosaurs race in and above the water.

  • 详细问题陈述

    • 我们需要弄清楚是否可以安排恐龙所需的所有动画时间。

    • 我们需要为这个游戏开发“正确”数量的关卡。

    • 我们需要弄清楚这个游戏里需要的所有能量增强。

    • 我们需要确定这款游戏应该支持的所有武器(并且由于网络限制而避免速射机枪)。

  • Detailed problem statements

    • We need to figure out if we can schedule all the animation time needed for the dinosaurs.

    • We need to develop the “right” number of levels for this game.

    • We need to figure out all the power-ups that will go into this game.

    • We need to determine all the weapons that this game should support (and avoid rapid-fire machine guns because of networking constraints).

注意问题陈述如何逐渐演变,并随着每个循环变得更加具体。还要注意丑陋的问题如何迅速浮出水面:如果团队没有这么早就尝试所有不同的角色设计会怎么样?如果在有人注意到让玩家在空中停留适当时间的问题之前,游戏的三个级别已经设计和建模完毕会怎么样?如果在有人意识到它会破坏网络代码之前,机枪系统已经编码完毕,整个游戏机制都围绕它展开,会怎么样?由于早期循环太多,这些问题很快就得到了解决。它看起来只是两个完整的循环和第三个循环的开始,但由于明智地使用了并行性,实际上有六个设计循环。

Notice how the problem statements gradually evolved and got more specific with each loop. Also notice how ugly problems bubbled to the surface quickly: What if the team hadn’t tried out all the different character designs so early? What if three levels of the game had already been designed and modeled before anyone noticed the problem of keeping players in the air for the right amount of time? What if the machine gun system had already been coded up and the whole gameplay mechanic centered around it, before anyone realized it would break the networking code? These problems got addressed quickly because of so many early loops. It looks like just two complete loops and the beginning of a third one, but because of the wise use of parallelism, there were really six design loops.

还要注意整个团队如何参与重要的设计决策。单个设计师不可能做到这一点——大部分设计都受到技术和美学的影响。

Also notice how the whole team was involved in important design decisions. There is no way that a lone designer could have done this—much of the design was informed by the technology and the aesthetics.

多少才够?

How Much Is Enough?

…现在我明白了,虽然为时已晚,但在我们计算成本之前,在正确判断我们自己的力量是否能够完成它之前,就开始做一件事情是愚蠢的。

-鲁滨逊克鲁索

…and now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.

—Robinson Crusoe

您可能想知道在游戏完成之前需要多少个循环。这是一个很难回答的问题,也是游戏开发如此难以安排的原因。循环规则意味着再多一个循环总会让您的游戏变得更好一些。俗话说,“工作永远不会完成——只会被放弃。”重要的是确保在用完整个开发预算之前,您有足够的循环来制作一款让您感到自豪的游戏。

You might wonder how many loops are needed before the game is done. This is a very hard question to answer, and it is what makes game development so difficult to schedule. The Rule of the Loop implies that one more loop will always make your game a little better. So as the saying goes, “the work is never finished—only abandoned.” The important thing is to make sure you get enough loops in to produce a game you are proud of before you’ve used up the entire development budget.

那么,当你站在第一个循环的起点时,能否准确估计何时才能完成一款高质量的游戏呢?不,根本不可能。经验丰富的设计师经过一段时间后,会更善于猜测,但大量游戏的发布时间比最初承诺的晚,或者质量低于最初承诺的,证明了根本无法知道。为什么会这样?因为在第一个循环的起点,你还不知道要构建什么!但是,随着每个循环的进行,你会对游戏的真正面貌有一个更清晰的认识,这可以让你做出更准确的估计。

So when you stand there at the beginning of the first loop, is it possible to make an accurate estimate of when you will have a finished, high-quality game? No. It is simply not possible. Experienced designers, after a time, get better at guessing, but the large number of game titles that ship later than originally promised, or with lower quality than originally promised, is testament to the fact that there is just no way to know. Why is this? Because at the beginning of the first loop, you don’t yet know what you are going to build! With each loop, though, you get a more solid idea of what the game will really be, and this allows for more accurate estimates.

游戏设计师 Mark Cerny 描述了一种他称之为“方法”的游戏设计和开发系统。毫不奇怪,该系统具有迭代和风险缓解系统。但是,方法对 Cerny 所说的“预生产”和“生产”(借用好莱坞的术语)进行了有趣的区分。他认为,在完成游戏的两个可发布级别并完成所有必要功能之前,您处于预生产阶段。换句话说,在完成两个完全完成的级别之前,您仍在确定游戏的基本设计。一旦达到这个神奇点,您就进入了生产阶段。这意味着您对游戏的真正含义有了足够的了解,可以放心地安排其余的开发工作。Cerny 表示,通常当花费了必要预算的 30% 时,就会达到这个点。因此,如果您花费 100 万美元达到这个点,那么实际完成游戏可能还需要 230 万美元。这是一条很好的经验法则,实际上,这可能是真正规划游戏发布日期的最准确方法。问题在于,你不会真正知道游戏的成本是多少,也不知道游戏何时会完成,除非你已经花费了开发成本的 30%。事实上,这个问题是不可避免的——方法只是引导你尽快达到可预测的程度。

Game designer Mark Cerny has described a system for game design and development that he calls “The Method.” Not surprisingly, this features a system of iteration and risk mitigation. But The Method makes an interesting distinction between what Cerny calls “preproduction” and “production” (terms borrowed from Hollywood). He argues that you are in preproduction until you have finished two publishable levels of your game, complete with all necessary features. In other words, until you have two completely finished levels, you are still figuring out the fundamental design of your game. Once you reach this magic point, you are now in production. This means that you know enough about what your game really is that you can safely schedule the rest of development. Cerny states that usually this point is generally reached when 30% of the necessary budget has been spent. So if it costs you $1 million to get to this point, it will probably cost you another $2.3 million to actually complete the game. This is a great rule of thumb, and realistically, this might be the most accurate way to really plan the release date for a game. The problem with it is that you won’t really know what the game will cost or when it will be complete until you have already spent 30% of what it will take to get there. In truth, this problem is unavoidable—The Method just guides you toward reaching a point of predictability as soon as is realistically possible.

多年来,我制定了自己的按时、在预算内完成游戏的经验法则,我称之为计划削减法则和 50% 法则。

Over the years, I have developed my own rules of thumb for getting games done on time and under budget, which I call the Plan-To-Cut Rule and the 50% Rule.

计划削减规则:在规划游戏时,请确保以这样的方式构建游戏:即使削减 50% 的预算,您仍然可以拥有一款可发布的游戏。此规则将迫使您保持系统简单,并有助于确保当出现问题(并且会出错)并且您必须削减某些功能时,您仍能保证拥有一款可发布的游戏。

The Plan-To-Cut Rule: When planning your game, make sure that you build it in such a way that if 50% of your budget were removed, you could still have a shippable game. This rule will force you to keep your systems simple and will help guarantee that when things go wrong (and they will go wrong) and you have to cut some features, you will still be guaranteed a shippable game.

50% 规则:所有核心游戏元素应该在计划进行到一半时完全可玩。如果这是真的,这意味着你将花费大约一半的时间让游戏运行起来,另一半时间让它变得出色。很多时候,开发人员计划花 80% 的时间来让游戏正常运行,花 20% 的时间来完善游戏。当然,如果出了问题,那 20% 的时间就会被浪费掉,最终,你的游戏就会迟迟无法发布,而且很弱。如果你计划在 50% 的时候让所有系统都可玩,那么即使出了问题,你也会有时间进行让你的游戏变得出色的重要循环。

The 50% Rule: All core gameplay elements should be fully playable at the halfway mark in your schedule. If this is true, it means you’ll spend about half the time getting the game working and half the time making it great. All too often, developers plan to spend 80% of the time getting it working and 20% of the time making it great. And of course, things go wrong, and that 20% gets eaten up, and in the end, you have a game that is late and weak. If you plan to have all systems playable at the 50% mark, even when things go wrong, you will have time for the important loops that make your game great.

你的秘密燃料

Your Secret Fuel

本章的大部分内容都是分析性的,这是理所应当的,因为周到的分析将极大地帮助确保您的游戏设计和开发得到优化。但是,经过所有这些分析,您很容易忘记自己最初追求这个想法的原因。

Much of this chapter has been very analytical, and that’s as it should be, since thoughtful analysis will do a great deal to help ensure that your game design and development are optimized. But with all that analysis, it can be easy to forget why you pursued this idea in the first place.

既然我们已经讨论了应该如何制作游戏,现在是时候考虑我们为谁制作游戏了。

Now that we have discussed how games should be made, it’s time to consider who we are making them for.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 比尔·巴克斯顿 (Bill Buxton) 著《草图用户体验》。本书探讨了草图的概念(提示:原型是一种草图),涉及多个学科,并得出了令人大开眼界的结论。

  • Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton. This book examines the notion of sketching (Hint: prototypes are a kind of sketch) across a wide variety of disciplines, with eye-opening results.

  • 有纸,就会做原型,作者:比尔·卢卡斯。本讲座是一系列关于如何成功创建计算机界面纸质原型的案例研究。

  • Have Paper, Will Prototype by Bill Lucas. This lecture is a series of case studies about how to successfully create paper prototypes of computer interfaces.

  • Mike Selinker 著的《Kobold 棋盘游戏设计指南》。这是关于如何设计出色的棋盘游戏的最佳书籍。

  • The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike Selinker. The very best book there is on how to design great board games.

  • Superbrothers 的Less Talk, More Rock。这篇文章认为游戏是一种行动的媒介,而不是文字的媒介,并令人信服地指出过多谈论设计可能会致命。

  • Less Talk, More Rock by Superbrothers. This article argues that games are a medium of action, not of words, and convincingly argues that too much talking about design can be fatal.

  • 敏捷软件开发。如果您想了解有关敏捷的更多信息,维基百科有关敏捷软件开发的条目写得非常好,并且有很好的参考资料。

  • Agile Software Development. The Wikipedia entry about Agile Software Development is quite well written and has excellent references if you’d like to learn more about agile.

  • 游戏设计的 4F:更快失败,追求乐趣,作者 Jason Vandenberghe。本文(基于 Marc LeBlanc 的想法)将优秀游戏设计流程的关键方面归结为清晰的基本要素。

  • The 4Fs of Game Design: Fail Faster, and Follow the Fun by Jason Vandenberghe. This article (based on an idea from Marc LeBlanc) boils down the key aspects of great game design process to clear, basic elements.

第九

CHAPTER NINE

游戏是为玩家而制作的

The Game Is Made for a Player



9.1

FIGURE

9.1

爱因斯坦的小提琴

Einstein’s Violin

在他职业生涯的某个阶段,阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦曾被一家小型当地组织邀请作为午餐会的贵宾,并就他的研究发表演讲。他同意了。午餐会非常愉快,时间到了,主持人焦急地宣布,著名科学家阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦将在那里讲述他的狭义和广义相对论。爱因斯坦走上舞台,看着一群大部分由老太太组成的非学术观众,他向他们解释说,他当然可以谈论他的工作,但这有点无聊,他想也许观众更愿意听他拉小提琴。主持人和观众都同意这听起来是个好主意。爱因斯坦接着演奏了几首他熟悉的曲子,为全体观众带来了一场愉快的体验,他们一定会终生难忘。

At one point in his career, Albert Einstein was asked by a small local organization to be the guest of honor at a luncheon and to give a lecture about his research. He agreed to do so. The luncheon was quite pleasant, and when the time came, the host anxiously announced that Albert Einstein, the famous scientist, was there to talk about his theories of special and general relativity. Einstein took the stage, and looking out a largely nonacademic audience consisting of mostly old ladies, he explained to them that he certainly could talk about his work, but it was a bit dull, and he was thinking perhaps instead the audience would prefer to hear him play the violin. The host and audience both agreed that it sounded like a fine idea. Einstein proceeded to play several pieces he knew well, creating a delightful experience the entire audience was able to enjoy and surely one they remembered for the rest of their lives.



9.2

FIGURE

9.2

爱因斯坦之所以能创造出如此难忘的体验,是因为他了解他的听众。尽管他喜欢思考和谈论物理,但他知道这不是他的听众真正感兴趣的事情。当然,他们请他谈论物理,因为他们认为这是获得他们真正想要的东西的最佳方式——与著名的阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦亲密接触。

Einstein was able to create such a memorable experience because he knew his audience. As much as he loved thinking and talking about physics, he knew that it wasn’t something that his audience would be really interested in. Sure, they asked him to talk about physics, because they thought it would be the best way to get what they really wanted—an intimate encounter with the famous Albert Einstein.

要创造出色的体验,你必须像爱因斯坦一样。你必须知道你的观众会喜欢什么,不会喜欢什么,而且你必须比他们更了解。你可能会认为找出人们想要的东西很容易,但事实并非如此,因为在很多情况下,他们并不真正知道。他们可能认为自己知道,但他们认为自己想要的东西和他们真正喜欢的东西之间往往存在很大差异。

To create a great experience, you must do the same as Einstein. You must know what your audience will and will not like, and you must know it even better than they do. You would think that finding out what people want would be easy, but it isn’t, because in many cases, they don’t really know. They might think they know, but often there is a big difference between what they think they want and what it is they will actually enjoy.

和游戏设计中的其他一切一样,这里的关键是倾听。你必须学会​​彻底而深入地倾听玩家的声音。你必须熟悉他们的想法、情绪、恐惧和欲望。这些都是秘密,甚至你的玩家自己都没有意识到它们——正如我们在第 6 章主题中所讨论的,这些往往是最重要的。

As with everything else in game design, the key here is a kind of listening. You must learn to listen to your players, thoroughly and deeply. You must become intimate with their thoughts, their emotions, their fears, and their desires. Some of these will be so secret that your players themselves are not even consciously aware of them—and as we discussed in Chapter 6: Theme, it is often these that are the most important.

展现自我

Project Yourself

那么你如何做到这种深入的倾听呢?最好的方法之一是利用你的同理心(将在第 10 章玩家心态中进一步讨论)将自己置于他们的立场。1954 年,迪斯尼乐园正在建设中,沃尔特·迪斯尼经常在乐园里走来走去视察进度。我们经常看到他走一段路,停下来,突然蹲在地上,凝视远处的某个东西。然后他会站起来,走几步,再蹲下。看到他反复这样做后,他的一些设计师问他在做什么——他的背是不是出了什么问题?他的解释很简单:否则他怎么知道迪斯尼乐园在孩子们眼中是什么样子的?

So how can you do this kind of deep listening? One of the best ways is to use your power of empathy (discussed further in Chapter 10: Player’s Mind) to put yourself into their place. In 1954, when Disneyland Park was being constructed, Walt Disney would frequently walk around the park inspecting the progress. Often, he would be seen to walk for a distance, stop, and suddenly crouch to the ground, peering at something in the distance. Then he would get up, walk a few steps, and crouch again. After seeing him do this repeatedly, some of his designers asked what he was doing—was there something wrong with his back? His explanation was simple: How else could he know what Disneyland would look like to children?

回想起来,这似乎是显而易见的——从不同的视角看事物是不同的,迪士尼乐园里孩子们的视角与成年人的视角一样重要,甚至比成年人的视角更重要。而且,物理视角还不够——你还必须采用他们的心理视角,积极地将自己投射到玩家的脑海中。你必须积极地尝试成为他们,努力看到他们所看到的,听到他们所听到的,想到他们所想的。很容易陷入设计师高高在上的思维,忘记将自己投射到玩家的脑海中——这是需要不断关注和警惕的事情,但只要你努力,你就能做到。

In retrospect, this seems obvious—things look different at different eye heights, and the perspective of children at Disneyland is just as important as, if not more than, the perspective of adults. And physical perspective is not enough—you must adopt their mental perspective as well, actively projecting yourself into the mind of your player. You must actively try to become them, trying to see what they see, hear what they hear, and think what they think. It is very easy to get stuck in the high and mighty mind of the designer and forget to project yourself into the mind of the player—it is something that requires constant attention and vigilance, but you can do it if you try.

如果你正在为曾经的目标受众开发游戏(例如,一位女性正在为少女开发游戏),那么你就有优势——你可以回忆起自己当时的想法、喜欢的东西以及当时的感受。人们很容易忘记年轻时的事物。作为一名设计师,你不能忘记。努力唤起你的旧记忆,让它们再次生动而强烈。好好利用这些旧记忆——它们是你最宝贵的工具之一。

If you are creating a game for a target audience that you used to be part of (e.g., a woman creating a game for teen girls), you have an advantage—you can get in touch with your memories about how you thought, what you liked, and how things felt when you were that age. People are surprisingly good at forgetting what things were really like when they were younger. As a designer, you can’t afford to forget. Work hard to bring back your old memories, and make them vivid and strong again. Keep these old memories well oiled—they are some of your most valuable tools.

但是如果你为一个你从未参与过、甚至可能永远不会参与的受众群体制作游戏,那该怎么办(例如,一个年轻人为中年女性制作游戏)?那么你必须使用不同的策略——你必须认真思考你所认识的目标人群,并想象成为他们是什么感觉。就像文化人类学家一样,你应该花时间与目标受众在一起,与他们交谈,观察他们,想象成为他们是什么感觉。每个人都有这样做的天赋——但如果你练习,你就会进步。如果你能在精神上成为任何类型的玩家,你就可以大大扩大游戏的受众,因为你的设计将能够涵盖其他设计师忽略的人群。

But what if you are making something for an audience that you have never been a part of, and perhaps never will be (e.g., a young man creating a game for middle-aged women)? Then you must use a different tactic—you must think hard about people you have known who are in the target demographic and imagine what it is like to be them. Like a cultural anthropologist, you should spend time with your target audience, talking with them, observing them, and imagining what it is like to be them. Everyone has some innate power to do this—but if you practice it, you will improve. If you can mentally become any type of player, you can greatly expand the audience for your games, because your designs will be able to include people that other designers have ignored.

人口统计

Demographics

正如人们所说,年龄并不会让我们变得幼稚。年龄只会让我们发现自己仍是真正的孩子。

—歌德

Age doesn’t make us childish, as they say. It only finds us real children still.

—Goethe

我们知道每个人都是独一无二的,但在创造一款供广大民众享受的游戏时,我们必须考虑人群的共同点。我们将这些群体称为人口统计,有时也称细分市场。没有“官方”的方式来建立这些群体——不同的职业有不同的理由将他们分为不同的群体。对于游戏设计师来说,两个最重要的人口统计变量是年龄和性别。随着年龄的增长,我们的游戏方式也不同,而且从历史上看,男性和女性在所有年龄段的游戏方式都不同。接下来是对游戏设计师必须考虑的一些典型年龄人口统计的分析。

We know that all individuals are each unique, but when creating something meant to be enjoyed by vast numbers of people, we have to consider ways that groups of people are the same. We call these groups demographics, or sometimes market segments. There is no “official” means of establishing these groups—different professions have different reasons for grouping them differently. For game designers, the two most significant demographic variables are age and gender. We all play differently as we get older, and, historically, males and females have played differently than one another at all ages. What follows is an analysis of some of the typical age demographics that a game designer has to consider.



9.3

FIGURE

9.3

  • 0-3 岁,婴儿/幼儿:这个年龄段的孩子对玩具非常感兴趣,但游戏的复杂性和解决问题的能力通常对他们来说太过强大。抽象界面(如游戏手柄)通常超出了他们的承受范围,但直接界面(如触摸屏)却令他们着迷。

  • 0–3, infant/toddler: Children in this age bracket are very interested in toys, but the complexity and problem solving involved in games is generally too much for them. Abstract interfaces (like a gamepad) are generally beyond them, but direct interfaces (like a touch screen), they find fascinating.

  • 4-6 岁,学龄前儿童:这个年龄段的孩子通常对游戏产生兴趣。游戏非常简单,与父母一起玩的次数多于与父母一起玩的次数,因为父母知道如何改变规则,让游戏保持有趣。

  • 4–6, preschooler: This is the age where children generally show their first interest in games. The games are very simple and played with parents more often than with one another, because the parents know how to bend the rules to keep the games enjoyable and interesting.

  • 7-9 岁,儿童:七岁一直被称为“理性年龄”。在这个年龄,孩子们已经入学,通常能够阅读,能够思考和解决难题。自然而然地,他们对玩游戏非常感兴趣。在这个年龄,孩子们也开始自己决定喜欢和不喜欢什么样的玩具和游戏,不再只是接受父母为他们选择的东西。

  • 7–9, kids: The age of seven has long been called the “age of reason.” At this age, children have entered school, are generally able to read, and are able to think things through and solve hard problems. Naturally, they become very interested in gameplaying. This is also the age where children start making their own decisions about what kinds of toys and games they like and dislike, no longer just accepting whatever their parents choose for them.

  • 10-13 岁,青春期前或“青少年”:直到最近,营销人员才开始认识到这个群体与“儿童”和“青少年”截然不同。这个年龄段的孩子正经历神经发育的快速时期,他们突然能够比几年前更深入、更细致地思考问题。这个年龄段有时被称为“痴迷年龄”,因为这个年龄段的孩子开始对自己的兴趣充满热情。尤其是对男孩来说,这些兴趣往往是游戏。

  • 10–13, preteen or “tween”: It is only recently that marketers have started to recognize this group as distinct from both “kids” and “teens.” Children of this age are going through a period of tremendous neurological growth and are suddenly able to think about things more deeply and with more nuance than they were a few years back. This age is sometimes called the “age of obsession,” because children of this age start to get quite passionate about their interests. For boys especially, these interests are often games.

  • 13-18 岁,青少年:青少年的工作是开始为成年做准备。在这个年龄段,我们经常看到男性和女性的兴趣存在显著差异。然而,所有青少年都非常有兴趣尝试新的体验,其中一些可以通过玩游戏来实现。

  • 13–18, teen: The job of a teenager is to start getting ready for adulthood. At this age, we often see a significant divergence between male and female interests. All teens, however, are very interested in experimenting with new kinds of experiences, and some of those can happen through gameplay.

  • 18-24 岁,青少年:这是第一个“成人”年龄组,也是重要转变的标志。一般来说,成年人玩游戏的时间比孩子少。大多数成年人确实会继续玩游戏,但此时,随着青少年时期的尝试结束,他们已经形成了自己喜欢的游戏和娱乐类型的品味。年轻人通常既有时间又有钱,这使他们成为游戏的大消费者。

  • 18–24, young adult: This is the first “adult” age grouping and the mark of an important transition. Adults, in general, play less than children do. Most adults do continue to play, but at this point, with their teenage experiments out of the way, they have established certain tastes about the kind of play and entertainment they enjoy. Young adults usually have both time and money on their hands, which makes them big consumers of games.

  • 25-35 岁,二十几岁和三十几岁:在这个年龄,时间开始变得更加宝贵。这是“家庭组建的巅峰”年龄。随着成年责任的增加,这个年龄段的大多数成年人只是休闲游戏玩家,偶尔玩游戏或与年幼的孩子一起玩游戏。另一方面,这个年龄段的“铁杆玩家”——即以玩游戏为主要爱好的人——是一个重要的目标市场,因为他们购买大量游戏,并且经常直言不讳地表达自己喜欢和不喜欢的内容,这可能会影响他们社交网络的购买决策。

  • 25–35, twenties and thirties: At this age, time starts to become more precious. This is the age of “peak family formation.” As the responsibilities of adulthood start to add up, most adults in this age bracket are only casual gameplayers, playing games as an occasional amusement or playing games with their young children. On the other hand, “hardcore gamers” in this age bracket—that is, people for whom playing games is their primary hobby—are an important target market because they purchase a lot of games and are often quite vocal about what they do and don’t like, potentially influencing the buying decisions of their social network.

  • 35-50 岁,三十几岁和四十多岁:有时被称为“家庭成熟”阶段,这个年龄段的大多数成年人都非常专注于事业和家庭责任,只是休闲游戏玩家。随着孩子长大,这个年龄段的成年人往往是决定购买昂贵游戏的人,如果可能,他们会寻找全家人可以一起享受的游戏机会。

  • 35–50, thirties and forties: Sometimes referred to as the “family maturation” stage, most adults in this bracket are very caught up in career and family responsibilities and are only casual gameplayers. As their children become older, adults in this age group are often the ones who make decisions about expensive game purchases, and when possible, they look for gameplaying opportunities the whole family can enjoy together.

  • 50+、50 岁及以上:这个年龄段的成年人通常被称为“空巢老人”,他们突然有很多空闲时间——他们的孩子已经搬出去了,他们很快就要退休了。有些人会重拾他们年轻时喜欢玩的游戏,而其他人则寻求改变,转向新的游戏体验。这个年龄段的成年人对具有强烈社交元素的游戏体验特别感兴趣,例如高尔夫、网球、桥牌和在线多人游戏。在线社交游戏尤其受到这个年龄段的欢迎。他们的眼睛和手已经不像以前那么灵活了,因此涉及小屏幕或复杂精细动作控制的游戏可能会让他们感到沮丧。

  • 50+, fifties and up: Often called the “empty nesters,” adults in this age bracket suddenly have a lot of time on their hands—their children have moved out, and they will soon be facing retirement. Some return to games they enjoyed when they were younger, and others, looking for a change, turn to new game experiences. Adults in this age group are particularly interested in game experiences that have a strong social component, such as golf, tennis, bridge, and online multiplayer games. Online social games, in particular, have been very successful with this age group. Their eyes and hands aren’t what they used to be, and so games that involve tiny screens or complex fine motor control can be frustrating to them.

还有其他方法可以按年龄划分群体,但这九个群体是游戏行业通常的做法,因为它们反映了游戏模式的变化。考虑将每个群体与下一个群体区分开来的过渡经历是很有趣的。大多数年轻群体因心理发展阶段而分开,而年长群体主要因家庭变迁而分开。

There are other ways to break up groups by age, but these nine groups are how the game industry usually does it, because they reflect changes in play patterns. It is interesting to consider the transitional experiences that separate each group from the next. Most of the younger groups are separated by periods of mental development, while the older groups are primarily separated by family transitions.

在为任何年龄段的人制作游戏时,有一点需要牢记:所有游戏活动都与童年有关,因为童年是以游戏为中心的。因此,要为特定年龄段的人制作游戏,您必须了解他们小时候流行的游戏和主题。换句话说:要真正与某人交流,您必须讲他们童年的语言。

Something important to remember when creating games for any age group: all play activities are connected to childhood, since childhood is centered around play. Therefore, to create games for someone of a particular age, you must be in tune with the games and themes that were popular when they were children. To put it another way: to truly communicate with someone, you must speak the language of their childhood.

媒介是厌恶女性者吗?

The Medium Is the Misogynist?

彼得·潘:我们玩得很开心,不是吗?我教你飞翔和战斗!还有什么可说的呢?

温迪:还有很多。

彼得·潘:什么?还有什么?

温迪:我不知道。我想随着你长大,你会更清楚。

PETER PAN: We have fun, don’t we? I taught you to fly and to fight! What more could there be?

WENDY: There is so much more.

PETER PAN: What? What else is there?

WENDY: I don’t know. I guess it becomes clearer as you grow up.

认为某些类型的游戏“天生就是男性的”或“天生就是女性的”是一种过时的刻板印象,尤其是在性别的本质受到质疑的时代。没有一种关于性别的概括可以适用于每个人。尽管如此,当我们观察大群体时,一些基于性别的游戏模式是显而易见的;有些类型的游戏女性比男性参与得更多,反之亦然。这是一个敏感的话题,因为当我们说“男性倾向于喜欢……”或“女性倾向于喜欢……”时,我们排除了那些违背这些倾向的人。

It is an outdated stereotype to say that certain types of play are “inherently male” or “inherently female,” especially in an age when the very nature of gender has been called into question. No generalization about gender can fit every individual. Despite this, when we look at large groups, some gender-based patterns of play are clear; there are certain types of play that females engage in more than males, and vice versa. This is a touchy subject, for when we say things like “men tend to prefer…” or “women tend to prefer…” we are excluding individuals who go against those tendencies.

有些人宁愿回避整个基于性别的游戏问题,并假装这些大群体模式不存在。但这样做就是否认现实,这对设计师来说是一件危险的事情,因为这些模式和趋势确实存在。玩《使命召唤》的男性比女性多,玩《糖果粉碎传奇》的女性比男性多。这是因为男性和女性天生就具有这种差异吗?还是从社会中学到的某些东西导致了这些差异?我们不知道。但了解和理解这些刻板模式对设计师很有用,因为通过了解它们,你可以包容更多的玩家。

Some people would prefer to dodge the entire question of gender-based play and act as if these large-group patterns don’t exist. But to do so would be to deny reality, which is a dangerous thing for a designer to do, because these patterns and tendencies do exist. More men play Call of Duty than women do, and more women play Candy Crush than men do. Is this because of something innate in what it means to be a man or a woman? Or is it something learned from society that causes these differences? We do not know. But knowing and understanding these stereotypical patterns can be useful to a designer, because by understanding them, you can be inclusive of many more players.

举个例子,我曾经开发过一款供全家人一起玩的射击游戏。这款游戏的设计风格轻松简单,所以我们当然也创建了一个简单的计分系统。另一位设计师找到我,解释说我们的计分系统存在问题:它有性别偏见。这在我看来是不可能的——这个主题在男孩、女孩、男人和女人身上都得到了很好的测试。但她是对的。当我们查看游戏测试数据时,我们可以看到,总体而言,男孩和男人的得分高于女孩和女人。查看游戏测试者的视频揭示了原因:男性倾向于快速射击,而女性则更喜欢基于仔细瞄准的方法。

As an example, I once worked on a target-shooting game designed for families to play together. The game was designed to be light and simple, so of course, we created a simple scoring system. Another designer approached me, explaining that our scoring system was a problem: it had gender bias. That seemed impossible to me—the theming had been focus testing very well with boys, girls, men, and women. But she was right. When we looked at the playtest data, we could see that, in general, boys and men had higher scores than girls and women. Reviewing videos of the playtesters revealed the reason: males tended toward a rapid-fire approach, while females preferred an approach based on careful aiming.

我们的解决方案是什么?我们创建了一个稍微复杂一点的计分系统。最终得分现在以两个数字表示:总分和准确率。当我们测试这个系统时,它效果很好。例如,我们的第一批游戏测试者是一对老年夫妇。游戏结束时,丈夫自豪地宣布:“我得分最高!”他的妻子露出优越的笑容说:“没错……但我的准确率要高得多。”

Our solution? We created a slightly more complex scoring system. The final score was now presented as two numbers: total points, and % accuracy. When we tested this, it worked well. For example, our first playtesters were an elderly married couple. At the end of the game, the husband proudly proclaimed, “I got the most points!” and his wife gave a superior smile and said, “True… but I was much more accurate.”

这就是刻板印象的讽刺之处。虽然刻板印象会让不合常规的人感到被排斥,但如果使用得当,它们可以成为包容的工具,创造出支持更广泛玩家兴趣和动机的游戏模式。为此,我们不必厌恶刻板印象,而是可以通过剖析和仔细研究它们获得重大益处。概括和刻板印象并不适用于每个人,但在为大量受众制作游戏时,它们可以成为有用的包容工具。

And this is the irony of stereotypes. While they can be used to make people outside the norm feel excluded, used wisely they can become tools of inclusion, creating play patterns that support a much wider variety of player interests and motivations. To this end, instead of turning from stereotypes in disgust, we can get significant benefit from dissecting them and studying them closely. Generalizations and stereotypes are never true for every individual, but when making games for large audiences, they can be useful tools of inclusion.

男性喜欢在游戏中看到的五种刻板印象

Five Stereotypes about What Males Like to See in Games

如果你是一名女性,但是你不了解男人,那么很可能你想得太多了。

—路易斯·拉米

If you are a woman and you don’t understand men, chances are you are thinking too hard.

—Louis Ramey
  1. 精通:男性喜欢精通事物。它不一定是重要或有用的东西——只要有挑战性就行。当精通具有有意义的目的时,女性往往对精通更感兴趣。

  2. Mastery: Males enjoy mastering things. It doesn’t have to be something important or useful—it only has to be challenging. Females tend to be more interested in mastery when it has a meaningful purpose.

  3. 竞争:男性喜欢与他人竞争,以证明自己是最好的。对于女性来说,输掉比赛(或导致另一个玩家失败的负面情绪通常会超过获胜带来的积极感觉。

  4. Competition: Males enjoy competing against others to prove that they are the best. For females, the bad feelings that can come from losing the game (or causing another player to lose) often outweigh the positive feelings that come from winning.

  5. 破坏:男性喜欢破坏东西。非常多。通常,当小男孩玩积木时,对他们来说最令人兴奋的部分不是建造,而是在塔建好后将其推倒。电子游戏非常适合这种游戏,因为它允许虚拟破坏,其破坏程度远高于现实世界。

  6. Destruction: Males like destroying things. A lot. Often, when young boys play with blocks, the most exciting part for them is not the building, but knocking down the tower once it is built. Videogames are a natural fit for this kind of gameplay, allowing for virtual destruction of a magnitude far greater than would be possible in the real world.

  7. 空间谜题:研究表明,男性的空间推理能力通常比女性强。因此,涉及三维空间导航的谜题对男性来说往往非常有趣,而对女性来说,它们有时会令人沮丧。

  8. Spatial puzzles: Studies have shown that males generally have stronger skills of spatial reasoning than females. Accordingly, puzzles that involve navigating 3D spaces are often quite intriguing to males, while they can sometimes prove frustrating for females.

  9. 反复试验:女性经常开玩笑说,男性讨厌阅读说明,这话确实有道理。男性往往更喜欢通过反复试验来学习。从某种意义上说,这让他们更容易设计界面,因为他们有时实际上更喜欢需要反复试验才能理解的界面,这与掌握的乐趣息息相关。

  10. Trial and error: Women often joke that men hate reading directions, and there is some truth to that. Males tend to have a preference for learning things through trial and error. In a sense, this makes it easier to design interfaces for them, since they actually sometimes prefer an interface that requires some experimentation to understand, which ties into the pleasure of mastery.

女性在游戏中喜欢看到的五种刻板印象

Five Stereotypes about What Females Like to See in Games

女性希望获得能够应用于自己生活的情感和社会探索的经历。

—海蒂·丹格尔迈尔 (Heidi Dangelmeier)

Females want experiences where they can make emotional and social discoveries that they can apply to their own lives.

—Heidi Dangelmeier
  1. 情感:女性喜欢探索人类丰富情感的体验。对于男性来说,情感是体验中一个有趣的组成部分,但很少是体验本身的目的。在“浪漫关系媒体”光谱的两端可以找到一个有点粗俗但很有说服力的例子来说明这种对比。一端是浪漫小说(所有售出的小说书籍中有三分之一是浪漫小说),主要关注浪漫关系的情感方面,几乎全部由女性购买。光谱的另一端是色情作品,主要关注浪漫关系的身体方面,主要由男性购买。当吉恩·罗登贝瑞 (Gene Roddenberry) 创作电视剧《星际迷航》时,他非常有意地将情感故事情节与节目的动作交织在一起,以增加家人一起观看的机会。同样,《龙腾世纪:审判》的女性玩家比一般的动作角色扮演游戏要多,游戏中角色之间丰富的情感关系似乎与此有关。

  2. Emotion: Females like experiences that explore the richness of human emotion. For males, emotion is an interesting component of an experience but seldom an end in itself. A somewhat crass but telling example of this contrast can be found at the ends of the “romantic relationship media” spectrum. At one end are romance novels (one-third of all fiction books sold are romance novels), which focus primarily on the emotional aspects of romantic relationships and are purchased almost exclusively by women. At the other end of the spectrum is pornography, which focuses primarily on the physical aspects of romantic relationships and is purchased primarily by men. When Gene Roddenberry was creating the TV show Star Trek, he very intentionally wove in emotional storylines with the action of the show to increase the chances that families would watch it together. Similarly, Dragon Age: Inquisition has more female players than the average action RPG, and the rich emotional relationships between characters in the game seem to have something to do with that.

  3. 现实世界:女性倾向于喜欢与现实世界有意义的娱乐。如果你观察年轻女孩和年轻男孩玩耍,你会发现女孩会更频繁地玩与现实世界紧密相关的游戏(玩“过家家”、假装兽医、玩装扮游戏等),而男孩会更频繁地扮演幻想角色。有史以来最畅销的女孩电脑游戏之一是《芭比时装设计师》,玩家可以在游戏中为现实世界中的芭比娃娃设计、打印和缝制定制服装。将其与《芭比长发公主》进行比较,后者是一款以幻想为背景的冒险游戏。虽然它以相同的角色(芭比娃娃)为主角,但它没有现实世界的元素,而且远没有那么受欢迎。

    这种趋势一直延续到成年——当事物以有意义的方式与现实世界联系起来时,女性往往会变得更感兴趣。有时这是通过内容(例如, 《模拟人生》游戏的女性玩家多于男性,其内容是模拟普通人的日常生活),有时是通过游戏的社交方面。在线社交游戏在女性玩家中很受欢迎似乎与好友列表作为游戏功能的核心有关。与虚拟玩家一起玩“只是假装”,但与真实玩家一起玩可以建立真正的关系。

  4. Real world: Females tend to prefer entertainment that connects meaningfully to the real world. If you watch young girls and young boys play, girls will more frequently play games that are strongly connected to the real world (playing “house,” pretending to be a veterinarian, playing dress-up, etc.), whereas boys will more frequently take on the role of fantasy characters. One of the all-time best-selling computer game titles for girls was Barbie Fashion Designer, which let players design, print, and sew custom clothes for their real-world Barbie dolls. Compare this to Barbie as Rapunzel, an adventure game in a fantasy setting. Although it featured the same character (Barbie), it did not have a real-world component and was not nearly as popular.

    This trend continues through adulthood—when things are connected to the real world in a meaningful way, women often become more interested. Sometimes this is through the content (the Sims games, e.g., have more female players than male, and their content is a simulation of the day-to-day life of ordinary people), and sometimes it is through the social aspects of the games. The popularity of online social games with female players seems to be connected to the centrality of the friends’ list as a game feature. Playing with virtual players is “just pretend,” but playing with real players can build real relationships.

  5. 养育:女性通常喜欢养育。女孩喜欢照顾洋娃娃、玩具宠物和比自己小的孩子。在竞技游戏中,女孩牺牲获胜位置来帮助较弱的玩家并不罕见,部分原因是玩家的关系和感受比游戏更重要,但部分原因是出于养育的乐趣。农场游戏和宠物游戏在女孩和女性中大获成功,很大程度上归功于它们的养育机制。在Toontown Online的开发过程中,战斗系统需要“治愈”游戏机制。我们观察到,治愈其他玩家对于我们讨论游戏的女孩和女性非常有吸引力,而且对我们来说,让这款游戏对男性和女性同样有效很重要,所以我们做出了一个不同寻常的决定。在大多数角色扮演游戏中,玩家大多会自我治愈,但也可以治疗他人。在Toontown中,你不能治愈自己,只能治愈他人。这会增加具有治疗技能的玩家的价值,并鼓励培养游戏。想要治疗的玩家可以将治疗作为他们在卡通城的主要活动。

  6. Nurturing: Stereotypically, females enjoy nurturing. Girls enjoy taking care of baby dolls, toy pets, and children younger than themselves. It is not uncommon to see girls sacrifice a winning position in a competitive game to help a weaker player, partly because the relationships and feelings of the players are more important than the game, but partly out of the joy of nurturing. The success of farming games and pet games with girls and women is due in large part to their nurturing mechanics. In the development of Toontown Online, a “healing” game mechanic was required for the combat system. We observed that healing other players was very appealing to girls and women we discussed the game with, and it was important to us that this game work equally well for males and females, so we made an unusual decision. In most role-playing games, players mostly heal themselves but have the option of healing others. In Toontown, you cannot heal yourself—only others. This increases the value of a player with healing skill and encourages nurturing play. A player who wants to can make healing their primary activity in Toontown.

  7. 对话和文字谜题:人们常说,女性缺乏空间能力,但她们的文字能力却有所提高。女性购买的书籍数量比男性多得多,填字游戏的受众也大多是女性。热门手机游戏Words with Friends 的大多数玩家(截至 2013 年为 63%)都是女性。

  8. Dialog and verbal puzzles: It is often said that what females lack in spatial skills they make up for in increased verbal skills. Women purchase many more books than men do, and the audience for crossword puzzles is mostly women. The popular mobile game Words with Friends has a majority (63% as of 2013) of players who are female.

  9. 通过实例学习:正如男性倾向于回避指示,喜欢尝试错误的方法一样,女性倾向于通过实例学习。她们非常欣赏清晰的教程,这些教程会一步一步地引导你,这样当玩家尝试一项任务时,她就知道她应该做什么。

  10. Learning by example: Just as males tend to eschew instructions, favoring a trial-and-error approach, females tend to prefer learning by example. They have a strong appreciation for clear tutorials that lead you carefully, step-by-step, so that when it is time to attempt a task, the player knows what she is supposed to do.

当然,还有很多其他刻板印象。例如,男性以喜欢一次专注于一项任务而闻名,而女性则更容易同时处理多项任务,而且不会忘记其中任何一项。《模拟人生》Farmville需要很强的多任务处理能力,而且这两款游戏的大多数玩家都是女性。“隐藏图片”游戏已成为女性中非常流行的游戏类型,因此有人推测它涉及原始的收集行为,有人认为这种行为在女性大脑中比在男性大脑中更为强烈。这是否是女性喜欢隐藏图片游戏的真正原因尚有争议,但这些游戏在这一群体中取得的成功却没有争议。

There are many other stereotypes, of course. For example, males have a reputation for preferring to focus on one task at a time, whereas females can more easily work on many parallel tasks, and not forget about any of them. Games like the Sims and Farmville demand significant multitasking skill, and both have a majority of players who are female. “Hidden picture” games have become a very popular genre with women, leading some to speculate that it engages primal gathering behaviors, which some believe to be more powerful in the female brain than in the male. Whether that is the true reason women like hidden picture games is controversial, but the success of the games with this demographic is not.

仔细审视你的游戏,同时思考性别刻板印象,有时会带来有趣的发现。孩之宝的Pox是一款无线电子手持游戏,它的设计师知道他们的游戏将是一种天生的社交体验,因此他们认为游戏应该具有女孩和男孩都喜欢的功能。然而,当他们观察孩子们在操场上玩耍时,他们注意到一件非常有趣的事情:女孩几乎从不自发地在大群体中玩游戏。从表面上看,这很奇怪——女孩往往比男孩更具社交性,所以你可能会认为涉及大型聚会的游戏会更吸引她们。问题似乎在于解决冲突。通常,当一群男孩在玩游戏时发生争执时,游戏会停止,进行(有时是激烈的)讨论,然后解决争执。有时,这会导致一个男孩哭着回家,但尽管如此,游戏仍在继续。当一群女孩在玩游戏时发生争执时,情况就不同了。大多数女孩都会在争执中站队,而且通常无法立即解决。游戏停止,通常无法继续。当女孩们正式组织起来时,她们会参与团队运动,但两个非正式的竞争团队似乎过于强调她们的人际关系,不值得这么做。孩之宝的设计师意识到,虽然他们的游戏概念是社交性的,但它本质上也具有竞争性,最终,他们决定将游戏设计为专注于典型的男性游戏模式。

Looking closely at your game while thinking about gender stereotypes can sometimes lead to fascinating discoveries. The designers of Hasbro’s Pox, a wireless electronic handheld game, knew that their game was going to be an inherently social experience, and so they reasoned that it should have features that girls would like as well as boys. As they observed children playing in playgrounds, however, they noticed something very interesting: girls almost never play games spontaneously in large groups. On the surface, this is strange—girls tend to be more social than boys, so you might expect that games involving large gatherings would appeal to them more. The problem seems to lie in conflict resolution. Generally, when a group of boys play a game and there is a dispute, play stops, there is a (sometimes heated) discussion, and the dispute is resolved. At times, this involves one boy going home in tears, but despite that, play continues. When a group of girls play a game and there is a dispute, it is a different story. Most of the girls will take sides on the dispute, and it generally cannot be resolved right away. Play stops, and often cannot continue. Girls will play team sports when they are formally organized, but two informal competing teams seem to put too much stress on their personal relationships to be worth the trouble. The Hasbro designers realized that though their game concept was social, it was also inherently competitive, and ultimately, they decided to design it focused on stereotypically male play patterns.

数字技术的引入极大地凸显了游戏玩法中的性别差异。过去,大多数游戏都非常具有社交性,是在现实世界中与真人一起玩的。而价格实惠的电脑的出现,让我们有了这样一种游戏,

The introduction of digital technology has done a great deal to make clear gender differences in gameplay. In the past, most games were very social, played in the real world, with real people. The introduction of affordable computers gave us a type of game that

  • 已删除所有社交方面的内容

  • Had all social aspects removed

  • 大部分语言和情感元素被移除

  • Had most verbal and emotional aspects removed

  • 很大程度上脱离了现实世界

  • Was largely divorced from the real world

  • 总体来说很难学

  • Was generally hard to learn

  • 并提供了无限虚拟毁灭的可能性

  • And offered the possibility for unlimited virtual destruction

基于此,早期的电脑和电子游戏主要受到男性观众的欢迎也就不足为奇了。随着数字技术的发展,电子游戏现在可以支持情感人物刻画、更丰富的故事情节,以及在方便的时候与真实朋友一起玩的机会,我们终于迎来了一个女性和男性玩数字游戏的比例大致相等的时代数字。希望不久的将来,我们能看到游戏开发者社区达到类似的平衡和代表性水平。

Based on this, it is hardly surprising that early computer and videogames were primarily popular with a male audience. As digital technology has evolved to the point that videogames can now support emotional character portrayals, richer stories, and the opportunity to play with real friends at convenient times, we have finally reached an age where women and men play digital games in roughly equal numbers. Hopefully, one day soon, we will see the community of game developers reach a similar level of balance and representation.

无论你考虑的是年龄、性别还是其他因素,重要的是你要站在玩家的角度,这样你才能仔细考虑什么能让游戏对他们来说最有趣。这个重要的视角是镜头 #19

Whether you consider age, gender, or other factors, the important thing is that you put yourself in the perspective of the player, so you can carefully consider what will make the game the most fun for them. This important perspective is Lens #19.

在为 DisneyQuest 开发《加勒比海盗:海盗金币之战》时,我们必须考虑广泛的受众群体。许多街机游戏厅和基于位置的互动娱乐中心的受众群体都比较狭窄:十几岁的男孩。DisneyQuest 的目标是支持与迪士尼主题公园相同的受众群体:几乎所有人,尤其是家庭。此外,DisneyQuest 希望全家人一起玩游戏。由于每个家庭的技能水平和兴趣各不相同,因此这是一个相当大的挑战。但通过仔细考虑每个潜在玩家的兴趣,我们找到了一种可行的方法。大致来说,我们是这样分解的:

When developing Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold for DisneyQuest, we had to consider a wide range of demographics. Many arcades and interactive location-based entertainment centers have a somewhat narrow demographic: teenage boys. DisneyQuest’s goal was to support the same demographic as the Disney theme parks: pretty much everybody, particularly families. Further, DisneyQuest wanted the whole family to play games together. With such a broad range of skill levels and interests within any given family, this was quite a challenge. But by carefully considering the interests of each potential player, we found a way to make it work. Roughly, we broke it down this way:

男孩:我们并不担心男孩会喜欢玩这款游戏。这是一款激动人心的“冒险和战斗幻想”游戏,玩家可以驾驶海盗船并操作强大的大炮。早期测试表明,男孩们非常喜欢这款游戏,并且倾向于进攻性地玩——试图寻找并摧毁他们能找到的每一艘海盗船。他们进行了一些交流,但始终专注于尽可能巧妙地摧毁敌人的任务。

Boys: We had little worry that boys would enjoy playing this game. It is an exciting “adventure and battle fantasy” where players can pilot a pirate ship and man powerful cannons. Early tests showed that boys enjoyed it a great deal and tended to play offensively—trying to seek out and destroy every pirate ship they could find. They engaged in some communication but always stayed very focused on the task of destroying the enemy as skillfully as possible.

女孩:我们不太确定女孩会喜欢这款游戏,因为她们并不总是对“炸毁坏人”抱有同样的热情。我们很高兴地发现,女孩似乎非常喜欢这款游戏;然而,她们玩这款游戏的方式不同。女孩通常更倾向于防守——她们更关心保护自己的船免受入侵者的攻击,而不是追击其他船只。当我们意识到这一点时,我们确保在入侵船只和可以追击的敌人之间建立平衡,以支持进攻和防守游戏。女孩们似乎对你可以收集的宝藏感到非常兴奋,所以我们确保将它们显眼地堆放在甲板上,让它们看起来很有趣。此外,我们设计了最后的战斗,让飞行的骷髅冲向船并从甲板上抢走宝藏。这似乎使骷髅射击任务对女孩来说更加重要和有意义。女孩们似乎也比男孩们更喜欢游戏的社交方面——她们会不断地互相喊出警告和建议,偶尔还会面对面“聚在一起”分担责任。

Girls: We were not so confident that girls would like this game, since they don’t always have the same zeal for “blowing up bad guys.” We were pleased to find that girls seemed to like the game a great deal; however, they played it in a different way. Girls generally tended to play more defensively—they were more concerned about protecting their ship from invaders than chasing down other ships. When we became aware of this, we made sure to create a balance of invading ships and enemies that could be chased to support offensive as well as defensive play. The girls seemed very excited about the treasures you could gather, so we made sure to pile them up conspicuously on the deck and make them visually interesting. Further, we designed the final battle so that flying skeletons would charge the ship and snatch the treasures off of the deck. This seemed to make the skeleton shooting task much more important and rewarding to the girls. The girls also seemed to enjoy the social aspects of the game more than the boys did—they would constantly shout warnings and suggestions to each other, occasionally having face-to-face “huddles” where they would divide up responsibilities.

男人:我们有时会开玩笑说男人就是“拿着信用卡的高个子男孩”。他们似乎和男孩一样喜欢这个游戏,尽管他们玩游戏的方式略显保守——他们经常仔细思考玩游戏的最佳方式。

Men: We sometimes joked that men were just “tall boys with credit cards.” They seemed to like the game in the same ways the boys did, although they tended to play the game in a slightly more reserved way—often carefully puzzling out the optimal way to play the game.

女性:我们不太相信成年女性,尤其是母亲们,会喜欢这款游戏。母亲们在主题公园的体验往往与家庭其他成员不同,因为她们主要关心的往往不是自己玩得有多开心,而是家庭其他成员玩得有多开心。在早期的海盗测试中,我们注意到女性,尤其是母亲们,往往倾向于靠近船尾,而家庭其他成员则靠近船头。这通常意味着家庭成员操纵大炮,母亲掌舵,因为船舵在船尾。起初,这似乎是灾难的根源——母亲可能不是一个自信的游戏玩家,而一艘驾驶不当的船可能会毁掉每个人的体验。

Women: We had very little confidence that adult women, mothers in particular, would find much to enjoy with this game. Mothers tend to have a different theme park experience than the rest of the family, because their main concern is often not how much fun they personally have but how much fun the rest of the family has. In early tests of pirates, we noticed that women, and mothers in particular, tended to gravitate toward the back of the ship, while the rest of the family moved toward the front. This usually meant that the family members manned the cannons and that mom steered the ship, since the ship’s wheel was in the back. At first, this seemed a recipe for disaster—mom might not be a confident gamer, and a poorly steered ship has the potential to ruin the experience for everyone.

但事实并非如此。由于妈妈希望每个人都玩得开心,她突然对尽可能好地掌舵这艘船产生了既得利益。掌舵时,视野最好,她有机会关注每个人,把船开到有趣的地方,如果家人不堪重负,她可以放慢速度。此外,她还处于管理船员的好位置,警告告诉他们即将来临的危险,并下达命令(“Zoe!让你的弟弟去那边!”),以确保每个人都玩得开心。这是让妈妈真正关心游戏结果的好方法。

But this isn’t what happened at all. Since mom wants to see everyone have a good time, she suddenly has a vested interest in steering the ship as well as possible. Being at the helm, which has the best view, she has a chance to keep an eye on everyone, to steer the ship to interesting places, and to slow things down if her family is overwhelmed. Further, she is in a good position to manage her crew, warning them of oncoming dangers and giving orders (“Zoe! Give your brother a turn on that side!”) designed to make sure everyone has fun. This was a great way to make mom really care about how the game turned out.

接受这样一个事实:母亲掌舵的次数比男孩、女孩或父亲多,这意味着我们必须确保,对于那些不经常玩动作游戏的人来说,掌舵是直觉的,但为了吸引我们观众中的关键部分,这是值得付出的一点代价。我们经常听到孩子们在下车时评论道:“哇,妈妈,你真厉害!”

Accepting the fact that mothers would be steering the ship more often than boys, girls, or fathers meant that we had to be sure that steering the ship was intuitive for someone who was not a frequent action game player, but this was a small price to pay to include a key part of our audience. Frequently, we would hear kids comment when coming off the ride: “Wow, Mom, you were really good at that!”

通过密切关注不同目标人群的需求和行为,我们能够平衡游戏以适应所有人。一开始,我们只是知道游戏可能存在哪些问题,无法吸引这四个群体——只有通过仔细的原型设计和游戏测试,我们才开始意识到这些问题的可能解决方案。我们密切关注每个人口群体如何尝试玩我们的游戏,然后我们对其进行修改以支持每个群体的游戏风格。

By paying close attention to the desires and behaviors of our various target demographics, we were able to balance the game to suit all of them. In the beginning, we just had ideas about where there might be problems making the game appeal to all four of these groups—it was only through attentive prototyping and playtesting that we started to realize the possible solutions to these problems. We watched closely to see how each demographic group tried to play our game, and then we changed it to support each group’s style of play.

心理统计学

Psychographics

当然,年龄和性别并不是对潜在玩家进行分组的唯一方法。您还可以使用许多其他因素。人口统计通常指外部因素(年龄、性别、收入、种族等),这些因素有时可以成为对受众进行分组的有效方法。但实际上,当我们根据这些外部因素对人们进行分组时,我们试图了解一些内部因素:每个群体的乐趣所在。更直接的方法是少关注玩家的外表,多关注他们的内心想法。这被称为心理统计。

Of course, age and gender aren’t the only ways to group potential players. There are many other factors you can use. Demographics generally refer to external factors (age, gender, income, ethnicity, etc.), and those can sometimes be a useful way to group your audience. But really, when we group people by these external factors, we are trying to get at something internal: what each group finds pleasurable. A more direct approach is to focus less on how players appear on the outside and more on how they think on the inside. This is called psychographics.

有些心理分类与“生活方式”选择有关,例如“爱狗人士”、“棒球迷”或“铁杆 FPS 玩家”。这些很容易理解,因为它们与具体活动相关。如果您正在制作一款关于狗、棒球或在竞技场射击人的游戏,您自然会密切关注这些生活方式群体的偏好。

Some psychographic breakdowns have to do with “lifestyle” choices, such as “dog lover,” “baseball fan,” or “hardcore FPS player.” These are easy to understand, since they are tied to concrete activities. If you are creating a game about dogs, baseball, or shooting people in arenas, you will naturally want to pay close attention to the preferences of each of these lifestyle groups.

但其他类型的心理特征与具体活动关系不大。它们更多地与一个人最喜欢的东西有关——他们在参与游戏活动或任何活动时寻求的乐趣。这一点很重要,因为归根结底,许多人类行为的动机都可以追溯到某种形式的快乐追求。然而,这是一个棘手的问题,因为世界上有很多种快乐,没有人只追求一种。但人们确实有自己的快乐偏好。游戏设计师马克·勒布朗列出了八种他认为是主要“游戏乐趣”的乐趣。

But other kinds of psychographics aren’t so tied to concrete activities. They have more to do with what a person enjoys the most—the kind of pleasures they look for when participating in a game activity or, really, any activity. This is important, for ultimately, the motivation for many human actions can be traced back to some kind of pleasure seeking. It is a tricky business, though, for there are many kinds of pleasures in the world and no one seeks only one kind. But it is certainly true that people have their pleasure preferences. Game designer Marc LeBlanc has proposed a list of eight pleasures that he considers the primary “game pleasures.”

乐芙兰的游戏乐趣分类

LeBlanc’s Taxonomy of Game Pleasures

  1. 感觉:感觉的愉悦涉及使用感官。看到美丽的事物,听到音乐,触摸丝绸,闻到或品尝美味的食物都是感官上的乐趣。游戏的美感才是带来这些乐趣的主要因素。Greg Costikyan 讲述了一个关于感官的故事:

    举个例子,我们可以看看棋盘游戏《轴心国与同盟国》,它就是单纯的感觉所造成的不同。我第一次买它的时候,它是由一家名不见经传的业余游戏出版商 Nova Games 出版的。它的棋盘非常花哨,用丑陋的纸板棋子代表军事单位。我玩过一次,觉得它很蠢,就把它收起来了。几年后,米尔顿·布拉德利 (Milton Bradley) 买下并重新出版了它,有了一块优雅的新棋盘,还有数百个飞机、舰船、坦克和步兵形状的塑料棋子——从那以后,我玩了很多次。在棋盘上推动小军事人物的纯粹触觉乐趣使游戏变得有趣。

    感官愉悦往往是玩具带来的愉悦感(见镜头#17)。这种愉悦感无法让坏游戏变成好游戏,但通常可以让好游戏变得更好。

  2. Sensation: Pleasures of sensation involve using your senses. Seeing something beautiful, hearing music, touching silk, and smelling or tasting delicious food are all pleasures of sensation. It is primarily the aesthetics of your game that will deliver these pleasures. Greg Costikyan tells a story about sensation:

    As an example of the difference that mere sensation can make, consider the board game Axis & Allies. I first bought it when it was published by Nova Games, an obscure publisher of hobby games. It had an extremely garish board, and ugly cardboard counters to represent the military units. I played it once, thought it was pretty dumb, and put it away. Some years later, it was bought and republished by Milton Bradley, with an elegant new board, and with hundreds of plastic pieces in the shapes of aircraft, ships, tanks, and infantrymen—I’ve played it many times since. It’s the sheer tactile joy of pushing around little military figures on the board that makes the game fun to play.

    Sensory pleasure is often the pleasure of the toy (see Lens #17). This pleasure cannot make a bad game into a good one, but it can often make a good game into a better one.

  3. 幻想:这是想象世界的乐趣,是把自己想象成不是自己的某种东西的乐趣。我们将在第 19 章和20章中进一步讨论这种乐趣。

  4. Fantasy: This is the pleasure of the imaginary world and the pleasure of imagining yourself as something that you are not. We will discuss this pleasure further in Chapters 19 and 20.

  5. 叙事:勒布朗所说的叙事乐趣并不一定意味着讲述一个既定的、线性的故事。相反,他指的是一系列事件的戏剧性展开,不管它们是如何发生的。我们将在第 16 章和第 17 章进一步讨论这一点。

  6. Narrative: By the pleasure of narrative, LeBlanc does not necessarily mean the telling of a prescribed, linear story. He means instead a dramatic unfolding of a sequence of events, however it happens. We’ll be talking more about this in Chapters 16 and 17.

  7. 挑战:从某种意义上说,挑战可以被视为游戏的核心乐趣之一,因为每款游戏的核心都有一个需要解决的问题。对于一些玩家来说,这种乐趣就足够了——但其他玩家则需要更多。

  8. Challenge: In some sense, challenge can be considered one of the core pleasures of gameplay, since every game, at its heart, has a problem to be solved. For some players, this pleasure is enough—but others need more.

  9. 友谊:勒布朗在这里指的是友谊、合作和社区中所有令人愉快的事情。毫无疑问,对于一些玩家来说,这是玩游戏的主要吸引力。我们将在第 24 章和第 25 章中进一步讨论一点

  10. Fellowship: Here, LeBlanc is referring to everything enjoyable about friendship, cooperation, and community. Without a doubt, for some players, this is the main attraction of playing games. We will discuss this further in Chapters 24 and 25.

  11. 发现:发现的乐趣非常广泛:任何时候你寻找并发现新事物,这就是发现。有时这是对游戏世界的探索,有时是发现秘密功能或巧妙策略。毫无疑问,发现新事物是游戏乐趣的关键。

  12. Discovery: The pleasure of discovery is a broad one: any time you seek and find something new, that is a discovery. Sometimes this is the exploration of your game world, and sometimes it is the discovery of a secret feature or clever strategy. Without a doubt, discovering new things is a key game pleasure.

  13. 表达:这是表达自我的乐趣和创造事物的乐趣。在过去,这是游戏设计中普遍被忽视的乐趣。如今,游戏允许玩家设计自己的角色并构建和分享自己的关卡。通常,游戏中发生的“表达”对于实现游戏目标几乎没有什么作用。在大多数游戏中,为角色设计新服装并不能帮助你晋级——但对于一些玩家来说,这可能是他们玩游戏的真正原因。

  14. Expression: This is the pleasure of expressing yourself and the pleasure of creating things. In the past, this is a pleasure that was generally neglected in game design. Today, games allow players to design their own characters and build and share their own levels. Often, the “expression” that takes place in a game does little to achieve the goals of the game. Designing new outfits for your character doesn’t help you advance in most games—but for some players, it may be the very reason they play.

  15. 屈服:这个奇怪的术语指的是进入魔法圈的乐趣——离开现实世界,进入一套新的、更有趣的规则和意义。从某种意义上说,所有游戏都涉及屈服的乐趣,但有些游戏世界比其他游戏世界更令人愉悦、更有趣。在某些游戏中,你被迫暂停你的怀疑——在其他游戏中,游戏本身似乎毫不费力地暂停你的怀疑,你的思想很容易进入并留在游戏世界中。正是这些游戏让屈服真正成为一种乐趣。

  16. Submission: This strange term refers to the pleasure of entering the magic circle—of leaving the real world behind and entering into a new, more enjoyable, set of rules and meaning. In a sense, all games involve the pleasure of submission, but some game worlds are simply more pleasing and interesting to enter than others. In some games, you are forced to suspend your disbelief—in others, the game itself seems to suspend your disbelief effortlessly, and your mind easily enters and stays in the game world. It is these games that make submission truly a pleasure.

研究这些不同的乐趣是有用的,因为不同的人对每种乐趣有不同的评价。游戏设计师理查德·巴特尔 (Richard Bartle) 多年来一直致力于设计 MUD 和其他在线游戏,他观察到玩家在游戏乐趣偏好方面可分为四大类。巴特尔的四种类型很容易记住,因为它们有扑克牌的花色作为方便的助记符。读者可以自己去理解为什么选择每种牌花色来代表每个类别。

It is useful to examine these different pleasures, because different individuals place different values on each one. Game designer Richard Bartle, who has spent many years designing MUDs and other online games, observes that players fall into four main groups in terms of their game pleasure preferences. Bartle’s four types are easy to remember, because they have the suits of playing cards as a convenient mnemonic. It is left as an exercise to the reader to understand why each card suit was chosen to represent each category.

Bartle 的玩家类型分类法

Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types

  1. 成就者希望达成游戏目标。他们的主要乐趣在于挑战。

  2. Achievers want to achieve the goals of the game. Their primary pleasure is challenge.

  3. 探索者希望了解游戏的广度。他们的主要乐趣在于探索。

  4. Explorers want to get to know the breadth of the game. Their primary pleasure is discovery.

  5. 社交者对与他人的关系感兴趣。他们主要寻求友谊的乐趣。

  6. Socializers are interested in relationships with other people. They primarily seek the pleasures of fellowship.

  7. 杀手对与他人竞争并击败他人感兴趣。这一类别与勒布朗的分类法不太吻合。在大多数情况下,杀手似乎喜欢竞争和破坏的混合乐趣。有趣的是,巴特尔将他们描述为主要对“将自己强加于他人”感兴趣,并将主要对帮助他人感兴趣的人归入这一类别。

  8. Killers are interested in competing with and defeating others. This category does not map well to LeBlanc’s taxonomy. For the most part, it seems killers enjoy a mix of the pleasures of competition and destruction. Interestingly, Bartle characterizes them as primarily interested in “imposing themselves on others” and includes in this category people who are primarily interested in helping others.

巴特尔还提出了一个有趣的图表(图 9.4),显示了这四种类型如何巧妙地覆盖了某种空间:即成就者对影响世界感兴趣,探索者对与世界互动感兴趣,社交者对与玩家互动感兴趣,杀手者对影响玩家感兴趣。

Bartle also proposes a fascinating graph (Figure 9.4) that shows how the four types neatly cover a sort of space: that is, achievers are interested in acting on the world, explorers are interested in interacting with the world, socializers are interested in interacting with players, and killers are interested in acting on players.

更多乐趣:更多!

More Pleasure: MORE!

在试图用如此简单的分类法来描述像人类欲望这样复杂的东西时,我们必须谨慎行事。仔细审查后,勒布朗和巴特尔的分类法(以及其他类似的列表)都存在漏洞,如果被误用,可能会掩盖那些很容易被忽视的微妙乐趣,比如“破坏”和我们在讨论性别刻板印象时曾遇到过“养育”。下面列出了一些需要考虑的乐趣:

We must use caution when trying to make such simple taxonomies to describe something as complex as human desire. Under close scrutiny, both LeBlanc’s and Bartle’s taxonomies (and other similar lists) have gaps and when misused can gloss over subtle pleasures that might easily be missed, such as “destruction” and “nurturing,” which we encountered in our discussion of gender stereotypes. The following is a list of a few more pleasures to be considered:



9.4

FIGURE

9.4

  • 期待:当你知道一种快乐即将来临时,等待它就是一种快乐。

  • Anticipation: When you know a pleasure is coming, just waiting for it is a kind of pleasure.

  • 完成:完成某件事的感觉很好。许多游戏都利用了完成的快感——任何需要你“收集所有宝藏”、“消灭所有坏人”或“通关”的游戏都在利用这种快感。

  • Completion: It feels good to finish something. Many games take advantage of the pleasure of completion—any game where you have to “collect all the treasures,” “destroy all the bad guys,” or otherwise “clear the level” is taking advantage of this pleasure.

  • 幸灾乐祸:通常,当一些不公正的人突然得到应有的惩罚时,我们会有这种感觉。这是竞技游戏的一个重要方面。德国人称之为幸灾乐祸(发音为“shoddenfroyduh”)。

  • Delight in another’s misfortune: Typically, we feel this when some unjust person suddenly gets their comeuppance. It is an important aspect of competitive games. The Germans call it schadenfreude (pronounced “shoddenfroyduh”).

  • 送礼:当你通过礼物的惊喜让别人开心时,你会感到一种独特的快乐。我们包装礼物是为了增强和强化这种惊喜。快乐不仅在于对方开心,还在于你让他们开心。

  • Gift giving: There is a unique pleasure when you make someone else happy through the surprise of a gift. We wrap our presents to heighten and intensify this surprise. The pleasure is not just that the person is happy but that you made them happy.

  • 幽默:两个毫无关联的事物突然通过范式转换而结合在一起。这很难描述,但当它发生时我们都知道。奇怪的是,它让我们发出吠叫声。

  • Humor: Two unconnected things are suddenly united by a paradigm shift. It is hard to describe, but we all know it when it happens. Weirdly, it causes us to make a barking noise.

  • 可能性:这是拥有众多选择并知道你可以挑选其中任何一种的乐趣。这通常在购物或自助餐桌上体验到。

  • Possibility: This is the pleasure of having many choices and knowing you could pick any one of them. This is often experienced when shopping or at a buffet table.

  • 为成就而自豪:这是一种独特的快乐,在成就之后仍能持续很长时间。意第绪语单词 naches(发音为“nock-hess”)就是指这种愉悦的满足感,通常指对孩子或孙辈的自豪感。

  • Pride in an accomplishment: This is a pleasure all its own that can persist long after the accomplishment was made. The Yiddish word naches (pronounced “nock-hess”) is about this kind of pleased satisfaction, usually referring to pride in children or grandchildren.

  • 惊喜:正如镜头#4 “惊喜”向我们展示的那样,大脑喜欢惊喜。

  • Surprise: As Lens #4, Surprise, shows us, the brain likes surprises.

  • 惊险刺激:过山车设计师们有句俗语:“恐惧减去死亡等于乐趣。”惊险刺激就是这种乐趣——你体验到恐惧,但又感到安全。

  • Thrill: There is a saying among roller coaster designers that “fear minus death equals fun.” Thrill is that kind of fun—you experience terror but feel secure in your safety.

  • 战胜逆境:这是你完成某件你明知不可能完成的事情时的那种快乐。通常,这种快乐伴随着个人胜利的欢呼。意大利人用一个词来形容这种快乐:fiero(发音为 fee-air-o)。

  • Triumph over adversity: This is that pleasure that you have accomplished something that you knew was a long shot. Typically, this pleasure is accompanied by shouts of personal triumph. The Italians have a word for this pleasure: fiero (pronounced fee-air-o).

  • 奇迹:一种压倒性的敬畏和惊奇的感觉。它几乎总是会引发好奇心,这就是“奇迹”一词的由来。

  • Wonder: An overwhelming feeling of awe and amazement. It almost always leads to a feeling of curiosity, which is how “wonder” gets its name.

还有许许多多。我列出了这些难以归类的快乐,以说明快乐空间的丰富性。快乐列表可以作为方便的经验法则,但不要忘记对可能不在你的列表中的快乐保持开放的心态。还要记住,快乐与环境息息相关。在一种情况下(在派对上跳舞)可能非常令人愉快,而在另一种情况下(在工作面试中跳舞)可能令人非常尴尬。快乐的关键视角为我们提供了镜头 #20

And there are many, many more. I list these pleasures that fall outside of easy classification to illustrate the richness of the pleasure space. Lists of pleasures can serve as convenient rules of thumb, but don’t forget to keep an open mind for ones that might not be on your list. Also keep in mind that pleasure is very context-sensitive. What might be very pleasurable in one context (dancing at a party) might be torturously embarrassing in another context (dancing at a job interview). The crucial perspective of pleasure gives us Lens #20.

深入了解玩家,比了解他们自己还要深入,这是为玩家提供他们喜欢的游戏的关键。在第 10 章中,我们将进一步了解他们。

Knowing your players intimately, more intimately than they know themselves, is the key to giving them a game they will enjoy. In Chapter 10, we will get to know them even better.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 理查德·巴特尔 (Richard R. Bartle) 著《设计虚拟世界》。这是一本回顾虚拟世界发展历史的优秀书籍,作者是一位深刻的思想家,也是虚拟世界的创造者。

  • Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard R. Bartle. An excellent book for looking at the history of virtual world development by a deep thinker who made it happen.

  • 《大脑的愉悦》由 Morten L. Kringelbach 和 Kent C. Berridge 编辑。汇集了各种心理学家和神经科学家关于愉悦机制的研究成果。如果您不习惯阅读科学论文,可能会有点望而生畏,但对于坚持不懈的读者来说,这是一个洞察力的宝库。

  • Pleasures of the Brain by Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, editors. A collection of research findings about the mechanisms of pleasure by a variety of psychologists and neuroscientists. If you are not used to scientific papers, it can be a bit daunting, but it is a treasure trove of insights for the persistent reader.

  • 了解孩子、游戏和互动设计:如何创造孩子们喜爱的游戏作者:Mark Schlichting。成年人很容易忘记童年的滋味。Mark 并没有忘记,他带我们领略了童年的奇妙之处。

  • Understanding Kids, Play, and Interactive Design: How to Create Games Children Love by Mark Schlichting. It can be easy for adults to forget what it was like to be a child. Mark has not forgotten, and gives us a guided tour of the wonderland that is childhood.

  • 《芭比娃娃和真人快打的多元化:游戏中的交叉视角和包容性目标》由 Yasmin B. Kafai、Gabriela T. Richard 和 Brendesha M. Tynes 编辑。游戏中的性别和性取向问题取得了重大而有意义的进展,但仍有很长的路要走。本书从多个深思熟虑的角度探讨了包容性问题。

  • Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Goals in Gaming by Yasmin B. Kafai, Gabriela T. Richard, and Brendesha M. Tynes, editors. Progress on gender and sexuality issues in games has been significant and meaningful, and there are still many miles to go. This book explores inclusivity issues from multiple thoughtful perspectives.

第十

CHAPTER TEN

体验存在于玩家的心中

The Experience Is in the Player’s Mind



10.1

FIGURE

10.1

我们已经讨论过,归根结底,体验是游戏设计师创造的。这些体验只能在一个地方发生——人类的大脑。娱乐人类的大脑很难,因为它太复杂了——它是已知宇宙中最复杂的物体。

We have already discussed that ultimately, experiences are what a game designer creates. These experiences can only happen in one place—the human brain. Entertaining the human brain is hard because it is so complex—it is the most complex object in the known universe.

更糟糕的是,它的大部分工作原理都是隐藏的。

Even worse, most of its workings are hidden from us.

在你读到这句话之前,你有没有意识到你的脚的位置、你的呼吸频率,或者你的眼睛是如何在书页上移动的?你知道你的眼睛是如何在书页上移动的吗?它们是平稳而线性地移动,还是跳跃着移动?你怎么可能读了这么多年的书却不知道这个问题的答案?当你说话的时候,你在说之前真的知道你要说什么吗?令人难以置信的是,当你开车的时候,你会以某种方式观察道路的曲率,并将其转化为你转动方向盘的旋转角度。谁做的计算?你还记得注意过道路的曲率吗?为什么只因为这句话中有“想象吃一个加了泡菜的汉堡包”,你的嘴巴就流口水了?

Until you got to this sentence, were you at all conscious of the position of your feet, the rate of your breathing, or how your eyes were moving across the page? Do you even know how your eyes move across the page? Do they move smoothly and linearly, or do they take little hops? How could you have read books for so many years without being sure of the answer to that question? When you speak, do you really know what you are going to say before you say it? Incredibly, when you drive a car, somehow you observe the curvature of the roadway and translate that into a rotational angle by which you move the steering wheel. Who does that calculation? Can you even remember paying attention to the curvature of the roadway? And how does it happen that just because this sentence contains the words “imagine eating a hamburger with pickles,” your mouth is watering right now?

考虑这种模式:

Consider this pattern:



10.2

FIGURE

10.2

不知何故,你知道接下来会发生什么。你是如何得出这个结论的?是通过演绎逻辑的过程,还是你只是“看到”了答案?如果你只是看到了,你看到了什么?你看到的那幅画是谁画的?

Somehow, you know what comes next. How did you reach that conclusion? Was it through a process of deductive logic, or did you just “see” the answer? If you just saw it, what did you see? And who drew the picture that you saw?

再举一个例子。试试这个实验:找一个朋友,让他们做以下三件事:

Here’s one more. Try this experiment: find a friend, and ask them to do these three things:

  1. 说五次“吹牛”这个词。“吹牛,吹牛,吹牛,吹牛,吹牛。”

  2. Say the word “boast” five times. “Boast, boast, boast, boast, boast.”

  3. 大声拼写“boast”这个词。“BOAST。”

  4. Spell the word “boast” out loud. “B-O-A-S-T.”

  5. 回答这个问题:“你在烤面包机里放了什么?”

  6. Answer this question: “What do you put in a toaster?”

你的朋友很可能会回答“吐司”。一般来说,吐司是你从烤面包机里取出的东西,而不是你放进去的东西。如果你省略前两个步骤,大多数人会给出更正确的答案,比如“面包”。用“吹嘘”来启动大脑网络就足以让“吐司”这个词看起来比正确答案“面包”更合适。我们通常认为回答“你在烤面包机里放了什么?”这样的问题是一个非常有意识的事件,但事实是,潜意识对我们所说的和所做的几乎每件事都施加了极大的控制。大多数时候它做得很明智和出色,我们觉得“我们”在做这件事——但有时,它会犯一个可笑的错误,并揭示它实际上拥有多大的控制力。

Your friend will likely give the answer “toast.” Generally, toast is what you take out of a toaster, not what you put in. If you omit the first two steps, most people will give a more correct answer, like “bread.” Priming the brain’s networks with “boast” is enough to make the word “toast” seem like a better candidate than the correct answer, “bread.” We normally think of answering a question like “What do you put in a toaster?” as a very conscious event, but the truth is that the subconscious exerts terrific control over almost everything we say and do. Mostly it does that wisely and well, and we feel like “we” are doing it—but from time to time, it makes a laughable mistake and reveals how much control it truly has.

我们大脑中发生的大部分活动都是隐藏在意识之外的。心理学家正在逐步理解这些潜意识过程,但总体而言,我们对它们的实际运作方式一无所知。我们的大脑运作方式大多超出我们的理解和控制范围。但大脑是游戏体验发生的地方,所以我们必须尽我们所能,了解大脑中正在发生的事情。在第 7 章理念中,我们讨论了如何利用创造性潜意识的力量成为更好的设计师。现在我们必须考虑玩家大脑中意识和潜意识的相互作用。关于人类大脑的所有已知知识都可以写满许多百科全书——我们将对大脑的考察限制在与游戏设计相关的一些关键因素上。

The majority of what is going on in our brains is hidden from the conscious mind. Psychologists are gradually making progress toward understanding these subconscious processes, but generally, we are in the dark as to how they really work. The workings of our mind are mostly outside our understanding and mostly outside our control. But the mind is the place that game experiences happen, so we must do what we can to get a working knowledge of what seems to be going on in there. In Chapter 7: Idea, we talked about using the power of the creative subconscious to be a better designer. Now we must consider the interaction of the conscious and subconscious in the mind of the player. Everything that is known about the human mind would fill many encyclopedias—we will contain our examination of the mind to some of the key factors that relate to game design.

有四种主要的心理能力使游戏成为可能。它们是建模、专注、想象力和同理心。我们将依次考虑每一种能力,然后检查每个玩家潜意识中的秘密优先事项。

There are four principal mental abilities that make gameplay possible. These are modeling, focus, imagination, and empathy. We will consider each in turn and then examine the secret priorities of every player’s subconscious mind.

造型

Modeling

现实极其复杂。我们的大脑能够理解现实的唯一方法就是简化现实,以便我们能够理解它。相应地,我们的大脑并不处理现实本身,而是处理现实模型。我们大多没有注意到这一点——建模发生在我们的意识之下。意识是一种幻觉,认为我们的内部体验就是现实,而事实上,它们是对我们可能永远无法真正理解的东西的不完美模拟。这种幻觉很好,但有时我们会遇到内部模拟失败的地方。其中一些是视觉上的,比如这张图片:

Reality is amazingly complex. The only way our minds are able to get by at all is by simplifying reality so that we can make some sense of it. Correspondingly, our minds do not deal with reality itself, but instead with models of reality. Mostly we do not notice this—the modeling takes place below our awareness. Consciousness is an illusion that our internal experiences are reality, when in truth they are imperfect simulations of something we may never truly understand. The illusion is a very good one, but at times we run into places where our internal simulations fail. Some of these are visual, like this picture:



10.3

FIGURE

10.3

事实上,这些点的颜色并不会随着我们的眼睛移动而改变,但我们的大脑确实让它看起来像是改变了。

In reality, those dots are not changing color as our eyes move around, but our brain sure does make it look like they are.

有些例子只有经过深思熟虑才能看得清楚,比如可见光光谱。从物理学的角度来看,可见光、红外线、紫外线和微波都是同一种电磁辐射,只是波长不同。我们的眼睛只能看到这种平滑光的一小部分光谱中,我们称这部分为“可见光”。如果我们能看到其他种类的光,那将非常有用。例如,看到红外光可以让我们在黑暗中轻松发现捕食者,因为所有生物都会发出红外光。不幸的是,我们眼球内部也会发出红外线,所以如果我们能看到它,我们很快就会被自己的光芒弄得眼花缭乱。因此,大量有用的数据,即电磁波谱可见光范围之外的所有内容,都不是我们感知到的现实的一部分。

Some examples don’t become clear until you think about them a little bit, such as the visible light spectrum. From a physics point of view, visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, and microwaves are all the same kind of electromagnetic radiation, just at different wavelengths. Our eyes can only see a tiny fraction of this smooth spectrum, and we call this fraction “visible light.” It would be very useful if we could see other kinds of light. Seeing infrared light, for example, would let us easily spot predators in the dark, since all living things emit infrared light. Unfortunately, the insides of our eyeballs emit infrared as well, so if we could see it, we would be quickly blinded by our own glow. As a result, a huge amount of useful data, that is, everything outside the visible light range of the electromagnetic spectrum, is not part of our perceived reality.

即使是我们能看到的可见光,也会被我们的眼睛和大脑以奇怪的方式过滤。由于我们眼睛的结构,可见光波长的分布看起来就像是分成了不同的组别,我们称之为颜色。当我们看着从棱镜中射出的彩虹时,我们可以画出线条来区分一种颜色和另一种颜色。但事实上,这只是视网膜机制的产物。实际上,颜色之间并没有明显的分界线,只有波长的平滑梯度,尽管我们的眼睛告诉我们,蓝色和浅蓝色比浅蓝色和绿色更相似。我们进化出了这种眼睛结构,因为将波长分成这样的组别是一种更好地理解世界的有效方法。“颜色”只是一种幻觉,根本不是现实的一部分,但却是一个非常有用的现实模型。

Even the visible light we can see is strangely filtered by our eyes and brains. Because of the construction of our eye, this spread of visible light wavelengths looks like it falls into distinct groupings, which we call colors. When we look at a rainbow that comes out of a prism, we can draw lines to separate one color from another. In truth, though, this is just an artifact of the mechanics of the retina. In reality, there is no sharp separation of colors, just a smooth gradient of wavelengths, even though our eyes tell us that blue and light blue are much more similar than, say, light blue and green. We evolved this eye structure because breaking up the wavelengths into groups like this is a useful way to better understand the world. “Colors” are only an illusion, not part of reality at all, but a very useful model of reality.

现实中充满了我们日常模型中完全无法想象的方面。例如,我们的身体、我们的家和我们的食物中充满了微小的细菌和螨虫。许多细菌和螨虫都是单细胞的,但其他细菌和螨虫,例如生活在我们睫毛、毛孔和毛囊中的毛囊蠕形螨,几乎大到可以用肉眼看到(最大 0.4 毫米)。这些微小的生物在我们周围无处不在,但通常根本不是我们思维模型的一部分,因为大多数情况下,我们不需要或不想知道它们。

Reality is full of aspects that aren’t at all part of our day-to-day modeling. For example, our bodies, our homes, and our food are teeming with microscopic bacteria and mites. Many are single celled, but others, such as the demodex folliculorum that lives in our eyelashes, pores, and hair follicles, are almost large enough (up to 0.4 mm) to be seen with the naked eye. These tiny creatures are everywhere around us, but are generally not part of our mental models at all, because mostly, we don’t need or want to know about them.



10.4

FIGURE

10.4

© United Features Syndicate。经许可使用。

© United Features Syndicate. Used with permission.

了解我们某些心理模型的一个好方法是寻找那些在我们思考之前感觉很自然的事物。请看查理·布朗的这张照片。乍一看,他似乎没什么特别的——他只是个男孩。但仔细想想,他看起来一点也不像真人。他的头几乎和他的身体一样大!他的手指是小肿块!最让人心痛的是,他是由线条组成的。看看你周围——没有任何东西是由线条构成的——一切都是由块状构成的。只有当我们停下来并有意识地思考时,他的不真实才会显现出来,这是大脑如何建模的线索。

One good way to get a grasp on some of our mental models is to look for things that feel natural to us until we think about them. Consider this picture of Charlie Brown. At first glance, nothing seems too unusual about him—he’s just a boy. But upon reflection, he looks nothing like a real person. His head is nearly as big as his body! His fingers are little bumps! Most distressing of all, he is made of lines. Look around you—nothing is made of lines—everything is made of lumps. His unreality doesn’t become apparent until we stop and consciously think about it, and this is a clue to how the brain models things.

尽管查理·布朗看起来不像我们认识的任何人,但他看起来像一个人,因为他符合我们的一些内部模型。我们接受他的大脑袋是因为我们大脑中存储的有关头部和面部的信息比身体其他部位多得多,因为有关一个人的感情的很多信息都来自他们的面部。如果他的头很小,脚很大,他就会立刻看起来很可笑,因为他根本不符合我们的内部模型。

Charlie Brown seems like a person even though he doesn’t look like anyone we know because he matches some of our internal models. We accept his giant head because our minds store much more information about heads and faces than the rest of the body, since so much information about a person’s feelings comes from their face. If instead he had a small head and giant feet, he would immediately look ridiculous, because he wouldn’t match our internal models at all.

那么他的线条又是怎么回事呢?对于大脑来说,观察一个场景并找出哪些物体是彼此独立的是一个具有挑战性的问题。当大脑这样做时,在我们的意识层面之下,我们的内部视觉处理系统会在每个独立的物体周围画线。我们的意识永远不会看到这些线条,但它确实能感觉到场景中哪些东西是独立的物体。当我们看到一幅已经用线条画好的图画时,它在某种意义上已经被“预先消化”,与我们的内部建模机制完美匹配,为我们节省了大量的工作。这也是为什么人们觉得卡通和漫画看起来很舒服的原因之一——我们的大脑需要做更少的工作来理解它们。

And what about his lines? It is a challenging problem for the brain to look at a scene and pick out which objects are separate from each other. When it does, below our conscious level, our internal visual processing system draws lines around each separate object. Our conscious mind never sees these lines, but it does get a feeling about which things in a scene are separate objects. When we are presented with a picture already drawn with lines, it has been “predigested” in a sense, matching our internal modeling mechanisms perfectly and saving them a lot of work. This is part of why people find cartoons and comics so soothing to look at—our brain needs to do less work to understand them.

舞台魔术师利用我们的思维模式,然后又打破它们,让我们惊叹不已。在我们的脑海中,我们的模型就是现实,所以我们感觉就像看到有人在做不可能的事情。魔术表演结束时,观众发出的惊呼声就是他们的思维模式被打破的声音。只有通过“这肯定是一个把戏”的信念,我们才能推断出魔术师没有超自然力量。

Stage magicians amaze us by taking advantage of our mental models and then breaking them. In our mind, our models are reality, so we feel like we are seeing someone do the impossible. The audible gasp that comes from an audience at the culmination of a magic trick is the sound of their mental models being torn asunder. It is only through our faith that “it must be a trick” that we are able to reason that magicians don’t have supernatural powers.

我们的大脑做了大量的工作,将现实的复杂性归结为更简单的心理模型,以便于存储、考虑和操作。这不仅适用于视觉对象。人际关系、风险和回报评估以及决策也是如此。我们的大脑看待复杂的情况,并试图将其归结为一组简单的规则和关系,以便我们内部操纵。

Our brains do a tremendous amount of work to boil down the complexity of reality into simpler mental models that can be easily stored, considered, and manipulated. And this is not just the case for visual objects. It is also the case for human relationships, risk and reward evaluation, and decision making. Our minds look at a complex situation and try to boil it down to a simple set of rules and relationships that we can manipulate internally.

作为游戏设计师,我们非常关心这些心理模型,因为游戏的规则很简单,就像查理·布朗一样——它们是预先简化的模型,我们可以轻松吸收和操纵。这就是为什么玩这些游戏很轻松——它们对我们的大脑来说比现实世界要少,因为许多复杂性都被剥离了。抽象的策略游戏,如井字棋和西洋双陆棋,几乎完全是裸露的模型。其他游戏,比如基于计算机的角色扮演游戏,采用一个简单的模型,并给它涂上一些甜美的美学,这样消化模型的过程本身就是一种乐趣。这与现实世界截然不同,在现实世界中,你必须非常努力地弄清楚游戏规则是什么,然后更加努力地按照规则玩游戏,永远不确定你是否在做正确的事情。这就是为什么游戏有时可以成为现实世界的很好练习——这也是为什么他们仍然在西点军校教授国际象棋——游戏让我们练习消化和试验更简单的模型,这样我们就可以逐步解决像现实世界一样复杂的模型,并在我们准备好时有能力处理它们。

As game designers, we care a lot about these mental models because games, with their simple rules, are like Charlie Brown—they are predigested models that we can easily absorb and manipulate. This is why they are relaxing to play—they are less work for our brain than the real world, because so much of the complexity has been stripped away. Abstract strategy games, like tic-tac-toe and backgammon, are almost completely bare models. Other games, like computer-based RPGs, take a simple model and coat it with some sugary aesthetics, so that the very act of working to digest the model is pleasurable. This is so different from the real world, where you have to work so hard to figure out what the rules of the game even are and then work even harder to properly play by them, never sure if you are doing the right thing. And this is why games can sometimes be great practice for the real world—it is why they still teach chess at West Point—games give us practice digesting and experimenting with simpler models, so we can work our way up to ones as complex as the real world and be competent at dealing with them when we are ready.

重要的是要明白,我们所经历和思考的一切都是模型,而不是现实。现实超出了我们的理解和领悟范围。我们所能理解的只是我们关于现实的小模型。有时这个模型会崩溃,我们必须修复它。我们所经历的现实只是一种幻觉,但这种幻觉是我们唯一能知道的现实。作为一名设计师,如果你能理解和控制这种幻觉在玩家脑海中的形成方式,你就能创造出比现实本身更真实的体验。

The important thing to understand is that everything we experience and think about is a model—not reality. Reality is beyond our understanding and comprehension. All we can understand is our little model of reality. Sometimes this model breaks, and we have to fix it. The reality we experience is just an illusion, but this illusion is the only reality we will ever know. As a designer, if you can understand and control how that illusion is formed in your player’s mind, you will create experiences that feel as real, or more real, than reality itself.

重点

Focus

时间有时像鸟儿一样飞逝,有时像蜗牛一样爬行;但是,当一个人甚至没有注意到时间是快速流逝还是缓慢流逝时,他是最幸福的。

—伊凡·屠格涅夫

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.

—Ivan Turgenev

大脑用来理解世界的一个关键技巧是选择性地集中注意力,忽略某些事物,将更多的精力投入到其他事物上。大脑的这种能力令人吃惊。一个例子是“鸡尾酒会效应”,即当满屋子的人同时说话时,我们却能专注于单个对话。即使许多对话的声波同时传到我们的耳朵里,我们仍然能够“收听”其中一个而“忽略”其他。为了研究这一点,心理学家进行了有时被称为“双耳分听研究”的实验。在这些实验中,受试者戴上耳机,每只耳朵都能听到不同的音频体验。例如,受试者左耳中的声音可能在朗读莎士比亚,而右耳中的声音可能在朗读一连串数字。只要声音不是太相似,受试者被要求集中注意力在其中一个声音上,并边听边复述他们听到的内容,通常都能做到。之后,当被问及另一个声音在说什么时,受试者通常一无所知。他们的大脑只关注选定的信息,而忽略了其他信息。

One crucial technique our brains use to make sense of the world is the ability to focus its attention selectively, ignoring some things and devoting more mental power to others. The brain’s ability to do this can be startling. One example is the “cocktail party effect,” which is our remarkable ability to pay attention to a single conversation when a roomful of people are all talking at once. Even though the sound waves from many conversations are hitting our ears simultaneously, we somehow have the ability to “tune in” one and “tune out” the others. To study this, psychologists have performed what are sometimes called “dichotic ear-studies.” In these experiments, subjects wear headphones that deliver different audio experiences to each ear. For example, a voice in a subject’s left ear might be reading Shakespeare, and the voice in a subject’s right ear might be reading a stream of numbers. Provided the voices are not too similar, subjects who are asked to focus on one of the voices and repeat back what they are hearing as they hear it are generally able to do so. Afterward, when asked questions about what the other voice was saying, subjects generally have no idea. Their brains focused only on selected information and tuned out the rest.

我们在任何特定时刻关注的焦点是由我们的潜意识欲望和有意识意志的结合决定的。当我们创造游戏时,我们的目标是创造一种足够有趣的体验,让玩家尽可能长时间、尽可能强烈地关注。当某件事长时间吸引我们的全部注意力和想象力时,我们就会进入一种有趣的精神状态。世界的其他部分似乎消失了,我们没有任何侵入性的想法。我们唯一想的就是我们正在做的事情,我们完全忘记了时间。这种持续专注、愉悦和享受的状态被称为“心流”,心理学家米哈里·契克森米哈赖和其他许多人都对这种状态进行了广泛的研究。心流有时被定义为“一种完全专注于某项活动的感觉,具有高度的享受和满足感”。游戏设计师对心流进行仔细研究是值得的,因为这正是我们希望我们的游戏玩家享受到的感觉。以下是创建让玩家进入心流状态的活动所必需的一些关键组件:

What we focus on at any given moment is determined through a blend of our unconscious desires and our conscious will. When we create games, our goal is to create an experience interesting enough that it holds the player’s focus as long and as intensely as possible. When something captures our complete attention and imagination for a long period, we enter an interesting mental state. The rest of the world seems to fall away, and we have no intrusive thoughts. All we are thinking about is what we are doing, and we completely lose track of time. This state of sustained focus, pleasure, and enjoyment is referred to as “flow” and has been the subject of extensive study by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and many others. Flow is sometimes defined as “a feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.” It pays for game designers to make a careful study of flow, because this is exactly the feeling we want the players of our games to enjoy. The following are some of the key components necessary to create an activity that puts a player into a flow state:

  • 目标明确:当我们的目标明确时,我们能够更轻松地专注于我们的任务。当目标不明确时,我们无法“投入”我们的任务,因为我们根本不确定我们当前的行动是否有用。

  • Clear goals: When our goals are clear, we are able to more easily stay focused on our task. When goals are unclear, we are not “into” our task, for we aren’t at all certain whether our current actions are useful.

  • 不受干扰:干扰会分散我们对任务的注意力。不专注,就无法流畅。这意味着要动脑子,动手。没有思想的琐碎劳动会让人心不在焉;只是坐着思考会让双手烦躁不安。这些“发痒”的感觉都是一种干扰。

  • No distractions: Distractions steal focus from our task. No focus, no flow. This means engaging both mind and hands. Menial labor with no thought makes the mind wander; just sitting and thinking can make the hands fidget. These “itchy” feelings are each a kind of distraction.

  • 直接反馈:如果我们每次采取行动时都必须等待才能知道该行动会产生什么效果,我们很快就会分心,无法专注于自己的任务。当反馈是即时的,我们就能轻松保持专注。我们将在第15 章界面”中更详细地讨论反馈。

  • Direct feedback: If every time we take an action, we have to wait before we know what effect the action caused, we will quickly become distracted and lose focus on our task. When feedback is immediate, we can easily stay focused. We’ll talk much more about feedback in Chapter 15: Interface.

  • 持续挑战:人类喜欢挑战。但这必须是我们认为可以实现的挑战。如果我们开始认为自己无法实现,我们就会感到沮丧,我们的大脑就会开始寻找更有可能获得回报的活动。另一方面,如果挑战太容易,我们就会感到无聊,我们的大脑就会开始寻找更有意义的活动。第 13 章平衡,将更多地讨论挑战。

  • Continuously challenging: Human beings love a challenge. But it must be a challenge we think we can achieve. If we start to think we can’t achieve it, we feel frustrated, and our minds start seeking an activity more likely to be rewarding. On the other hand, if the challenge is too easy, we feel bored, and again, our minds start seeking more rewarding activities. Chapter 13: Balance, will have more to say about challenge.

心流活动必须设法保持在无聊和沮丧之间的狭窄挑战范围内,因为这两个令人不快的极端都会导致我们的思维将注意力转移到新的活动上。Csikszentmihalyi 称这个范围为“心流通道”。他给出了一个心流通道的例子,毫不奇怪,他用了一个游戏:

Flow activities must manage to stay in the narrow margin of challenge that lies between boredom and frustration, for both of these unpleasant extremes cause our mind to change its focus to a new activity. Csikszentmihalyi calls this margin the “flow channel.” He gives an example of the flow channel, using, not surprisingly, a game:

假设下图代表一项特定的活动,例如网球比赛。理论上,经验的两个最重要的维度,挑战和技能,分别表示在图表的两个轴上。字母 A 代表 Alex,一个正在学习打网球的男孩。该图显示了 Alex 在四个不同时间点的状态。当他第一次开始打网球时(A 1),Alex 几乎没有任何技能,他面临的唯一挑战就是将球击过网。这不是一项非常困难的壮举,但 Alex 可能会喜欢它,因为难度刚好适合他的基本技能。所以在这一点上,他可能会处于心流状态。但他不能长时间停留在那里。一段时间后,如果他继续练习,他的技能肯定会提高,然后他会厌倦只是将球击过网(A 2)。或者他可能会遇到一个更有经验的对手,在这种情况下,他会意识到对他来说,还有比仅仅投球更困难的挑战——在那个时候,他会对自己糟糕的表现感到有些焦虑(A 3)。



10.5

无聊和焦虑都不是积极的体验,所以亚历克斯会受到激励回到心流状态。他该怎么做呢?再看一眼图表,我们发现,如果他感到无聊(A2 ,并希望再次进入心流状态,亚历克斯基本上只有一个选择:增加他所面临的挑战。(他还有第二个选择,那就是完全放弃打网球——在这种情况下,A 会从图表中消失。)通过为自己设定一个与他的技能相匹配的新的、更困难的目标——例如,击败一个比他稍微高级一点的对手——亚历克斯将回到心流状态(A4

如果 Alex 感到焦虑(A 3),那么要回到心流状态,就需要提高自己的技能。理论上,他也可以减少面临的挑战,从而回到心流状态的起点(A 1),但在实践中,一旦意识到挑战的存在,就很难忽视它们。

图表显示 A 1和 A 4都代表 Alex 处于心流状态的情况。虽然这两种状态同样令人愉快,但这两种状态有很大不同,因为 A 4比 A 1 的体验更复杂。它更复杂是因为它涉及更大的挑战,并且要求玩家具备更高的技能。

但是 A 4虽然复杂且有趣,但也不代表稳定的情况。随着 Alex 继续玩下去,他要么会对在该级别找到的陈旧机会感到厌烦,要么会对自己相对较低的能力感到焦虑和沮丧。因此,再次享受乐趣的动力将推动他回到心流通道,但现在的复杂程度甚至高于 A 4

正是这种动态特性解释了为什么心流活动会带来成长和发现。人们不可能长时间享受做同样的事情的乐趣。我们要么感到无聊,要么感到沮丧,然后再次享受的欲望会促使我们拓展自己的技能,或发现使用它们的新机会。

Let us assume that the figure below represents a specific activity—for example, the game of tennis. The two theoretically most important dimensions of the experience, challenges and skills, are represented on the two axes of the diagram. The letter A represents Alex, a boy who is learning to play tennis. The diagram shows Alex at four different points in time. When he first starts playing (A1), Alex has practically no skills, and the only challenge he faces is hitting the ball over the net. This is not a very difficult feat, but Alex is likely to enjoy it because the difficulty is just right for his rudimentary skills. So at this point he will probably be in flow. But he cannot stay there long. After a while, if he keeps practicing, his skills are bound to improve, and then he will grow bored just batting the ball over the net (A2). Or it might happen that he meets a more practiced opponent, in which case he will realize that there are much harder challenges for him than just lobbing the ball—at that point, he will feel some anxiety (A3) concerning his poor performance.

FIGURE

10.5

Neither boredom nor anxiety are positive experiences, so Alex will be motivated to return to the flow state. How is he to do it? Glancing again at the diagram, we see that if he is bored (A2) and wishes to be in flow again, Alex has essentially only one choice: to increase the challenges he is facing. (He also has a second choice, which is to give up tennis altogether—in which case A would simply disappear from the diagram.) By setting himself a new and more difficult goal that matches his skills—for instance, to beat an opponent just a little more advanced that he is—Alex would be back in flow (A4).

If Alex is anxious (A3), the way back to flow requires that he increase his skills. Theoretically he could also reduce the challenges he is facing, and thus return to the flow where he started (in A1), but in practice it is difficult to ignore challenges once one is aware that they exist.

The diagram shows that both A1 and A4 represent situations in which Alex is in flow. Although both are equally enjoyable, the two states are quite different in that A4 is a more complex experience than A1. It is more complex because it involves greater challenges, and demands greater skill from the player.

But A4, although complex and enjoyable, does not represent a stable situation either. As Alex keeps playing, either he will become bored by the stale opportunities he finds at that level, or he will become anxious and frustrated by his relatively low ability. So the motivation to enjoy himself again will push him to get back into the flow channel, but now at a level of complexity even higher than A4.

It is this dynamic feature that explains why flow activities lead to growth and discovery. One cannot enjoy doing the same thing at the same level for long. We grow either bored or frustrated, and then the desire to enjoy ourselves again pushes us to stretch our skills, or to discover new opportunities for using them.

你可以看到,让玩家保持在心流通道中是一种微妙的平衡,因为玩家的技能水平很少停留在一个地方。随着他们的技能提高,你必须向他们提出相应的挑战。对于传统游戏来说,这种挑战主要来自于寻找更具挑战性的对手。在电子游戏中,通常会有一系列逐渐变得更具挑战性的关卡。这种难度不断增加的关卡模式可以很好地实现自我平衡——技术娴熟的玩家通常可以快速通过较低关卡,直到到达具有挑战性的关卡。这种技能与完成关卡速度之间的联系有助于防止技术娴熟的玩家感到无聊。然而,很少有玩家能够坚持不懈地赢得游戏,掌握所有关卡。大多数玩家最终都会达到一个关卡,他们会在沮丧区花费大量时间,最终放弃游戏。关于这是坏事(许多玩家感到沮丧)还是好事(因为只有技术娴熟、坚持不懈的玩家才能到达终点,所以成就感很特别),存在很多争论。

You can see how keeping someone in the flow channel is a delicate balance, for a player’s skill level seldom stays in one place. As their skill increases, you must present them with commensurate challenges. For traditional games, this challenge primarily comes from seeking out more challenging opponents. In videogames, there is often a sequence of levels that gradually get more challenging. This pattern of levels of increasing difficulty is nicely self-balancing—players with a lot of skill can usually move through the lower levels quickly, until they come to the levels that challenge them. This connection between skill and the speed of finishing a level helps keep skilled players from getting bored. However, it is the rare player who is persistent enough to win the game, mastering all levels. Most players eventually reach a level where they spend so much time in the frustration zone that they give up on the game. There is much debate about whether that is a bad thing (many players are frustrated) or a good thing (since only skilled, persistent players can reach the end, the accomplishment is special).

许多设计师很快指出,虽然留在流动通道中很重要,但有些向上移动通道的方法比其他方法更好。像这样直接向上移动通道……

Many designers are quick to point out that while staying in the flow channel is important, some ways of moving up the channel are better than others. Moving straight up the channel like this…



10.6

FIGURE

10.6

…绝对比以焦虑或无聊结束的游戏要好。但请考虑一下遵循以下轨迹的游戏体验:

…is definitely better than the game ending in anxiety or boredom. But consider the play experience that follows a track more like this:



10.7

FIGURE

10.7

这可能让玩家觉得更有趣。这是一个不断增加挑战的循环,随后是奖励,通常奖励更强大,这会带来一个挑战较少的轻松期。很快,挑战又会再次升级。例如,一款电子游戏可能会有一把枪,只要我射击三次敌人,它就能消灭敌人。随着游戏的进行,敌人的数量会越来越多,挑战也会随之增加。但如果我接受挑战,击败足够多的敌人,我可能会得到一把枪,让我只用两枪就能消灭敌人。突然间,游戏变得更容易了,这非常值得。然而,这个轻松期不会持续太久,因为很快会出现新的敌人,即使使用我的新枪,也需要三枪甚至四枪才能消灭它们,这将挑战推向新的高度。

This will probably feel much more interesting to a player. It is a repeating cycle of increasing challenge, followed by a reward, often of more power, which gives an easier period of less challenge. Soon enough, the challenge ramps up again. For example, a videogame might feature a gun that lets me destroy enemies if I shoot them three times. As I proceed through the game, the enemies grow more numerous, increasing the challenge. If I rise to the challenge, though, and defeat enough enemies, I might be rewarded with a gun that lets me destroy the enemies with only two shots. Suddenly the game is easier, which is very rewarding. This easy period doesn’t last though, because soon new enemies that take three and even four shots to destroy, even with my new gun, will start to appear, taking the challenge to new heights.

这种“紧张和放松,紧张和放松”的循环在设计中反复出现。这似乎是人类享受的固有特征。过度紧张,我们会疲惫不堪。过度放松,我们会感到无聊。当我们在两者之间波动时,我们既享受兴奋,又享受放松,这种振荡也提供了多样性的乐趣和期待的乐趣。

This cycle of “tense and release, tense and release” comes up again and again in design. It seems to be inherent to human enjoyment. Too much tension, and we wear out. Too much relaxation, and we grow bored. When we fluctuate between the two, we enjoy both excitement and relaxation, and this oscillation also provides both the pleasure of variety and the pleasure of anticipation.

您可以看到,流程和流程通道的概念对于讨论和分析游戏体验有多么有用 - 非常有用,它是镜头#21

You can see how useful the idea of flow and the flow channel can be for discussing and analyzing a gameplay experience—so useful that it is Lens #21.

心流是很难测试的。你不会在十分钟的游戏时间里发现它。你必须观察玩家更长时间。更棘手的是,一款在最初几次游戏中保持心流的游戏可能会在之后变得无聊或令人沮丧。

Flow is a very hard thing to test for. You won’t see it in ten minutes of gameplay. You must observe players for longer periods. Even trickier, a game that keeps someone in flow the first few times they play it may later become boring or frustrating.

观察玩家时,心流状态很容易被忽略——你必须学会​​识别它。心流状态并不总是伴随着外部情绪表达——它通常涉及安静的退缩。玩单人游戏时,心流状态的玩家通常会很安静,可能会自言自语。他们非常专注,所以如果你问他们问题,他们有时会反应迟钝或感到恼火。在多人游戏中,心流状态的玩家有时会热情地相互交流,始终专注于游戏。一旦你注意到玩家在游戏中进入心流状态,你就需要密切关注他们——他们不会永远呆在那里。你必须注意那个关键时刻——让他们脱离心流通道的事件,这样你就可以想办法确保该事件不会发生在你的下一个游戏原型中。

When observing a player, flow can be easy to miss—you must learn to recognize it. It is not always accompanied by external expressions of emotion—it often involves quiet withdrawal. Players in flow playing solo games will often be quiet, possibly muttering to themselves. They are so focused that they are sometimes slow to respond or irritated if you ask them questions. Players in flow during multiplayer games will sometimes communicate with one another enthusiastically, constantly focused on the game. Once you notice a player going into flow during your game, you need to watch them closely—they won’t stay there forever. You must watch for that crucial moment—the event that moves them out of the flow channel, so you can figure out how to make sure that event doesn’t happen in your next prototype of the game.

最后一点:别忘了把心流镜头对准自己!你肯定会发现,作为一名设计师,心流时刻是你完成最多工作的时候——一定要安排好你的设计时间,这样你才能尽可能频繁地进入那种特殊的精神状态。

One final note: don’t forget to turn the Lens of Flow on yourself! You will surely find that times of flow are when you get the most done as a designer—make sure to organize your design time so you can get to that special state of mind as frequently as possible.

共情

Empathy

作为人类,我们有一种惊人的能力,能将自己置于他人的位置。当我们这样做时,我们会尽最大努力思考对方的想法并感受他们的感受。这是我们相互理解能力的标志之一,也是游戏玩法不可或缺的一部分。

As human beings, we have an amazing ability to project ourselves into the place of others. When we do this, we think the other person’s thoughts and feel their feelings, to the best of our ability. It is one of the hallmarks of our ability to understand one another that we can do this, and it is an integral part of gameplay.

有一个有趣的戏剧练习,将一组演员分成两组。在第一组中,每个演员选择一种情绪(快乐、悲伤、愤怒等),然后他们都在舞台上走来走去,每个人都试图通过态度、步态和面部表情来表达自己选择的情绪。第二组不选择情绪。他们只是在第一组中随意走动,试图与其他人建立目光接触。第一次尝试时,第二组的演员发现自己做了一件令人震惊的事情——每当他们与表达情绪的人目光接触时,他们自己就会表现出这种情绪并做出相应的面部表情,而这并不是有意识的。

There is an interesting theater exercise where a group of actors is divided into two groups. In the first group, each actor chooses an emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, etc.), and then they all mill about the stage, each trying to project their chosen emotion through attitude, walk, and facial expression. The second group does not choose an emotion. They just walk about at random among the first group, trying to establish eye contact with others. The first time they try this, the actors in the second group discover themselves doing something shocking—whenever they make eye contact with someone projecting an emotion, they take on the emotion themselves and make the corresponding facial expression, without consciously willing to do so.

我们的共情能力就是这么强大。我们无需费力,就变成了另一个人。当我们看到快乐的人时,我们可以感受到他们的快乐,就像我们自己的快乐一样。当我们看到悲伤的人时,我们可以感受到他们的痛苦。艺人利用我们的共情能力让我们感觉自己是他们创造的故事世界的一部分。令人惊讶的是,我们的共情可以在眨眼间从一个人转移到另一个人。我们甚至可以同情动物。

This is how strong our power of empathy can be. Without even trying, we become other people. When we see someone who is happy, we can feel their joy as if it is our own. When we see someone who is sad, we can feel their pain. Entertainers use our power of empathy to make us feel we are part of the story world they are creating. Amazingly, our empathy can be cast from one person to another in the blink of an eye. We can even empathize with animals.

你有没有注意到,狗的面部表情比其他动物丰富得多?它们用眼睛和眉毛表达情感,就像我们一样图 10.8)。狼(狗的祖先)的面部表情范围远不及家养狗。狗似乎已经将这种能力进化为一种生存技能。能够做出正确表情的狗可以引起我们的同情,而我们突然感受到它们的感受,就更有可能照顾它们。

Have you noticed that dogs have much richer facial expression than other animals? They express emotion with their eyes and eyebrows much like we do (Figure 10.8). Wolves (dog ancestors) don’t have nearly the range of facial expression of domesticated dogs. Dogs appear to have evolved this ability as a survival skill. Dogs that could make the right faces could capture our empathy, and we, suddenly feeling their feelings, became more likely to take care of them.

当然,大脑使用心智模型来完成所有这些工作——事实上,我们不是同情真实的人或动物,而是同情我们对它们的心智模型——这意味着我们很容易被欺骗。我们可以在没有情感的时候感受到情感。一张照片、一幅画或一个电子游戏角色同样可以轻易地捕捉到我们的同情心。电影摄影师明白这一点,他们把我们的同情心从一个角色转移到另一个角色,从而操纵我们的感受和情绪。下次看电视时,请时刻注意你的同情心流向何处以及它为什么会流向那里。

Of course, the brain does all this using mental models—in truth, we are empathizing not with real people or animals, but with our mental models of them—which means we are easily tricked. We can feel emotion when there is none. A photo, a drawing, or a videogame character can just as easily capture our empathy. Cinematographers understand this, and they fling our empathy all over the place, from one character to another, thus manipulating our feelings and emotions. Next time you watch television, pay attention, moment to moment, about where your empathy is going and why it is going there.



10.8

FIGURE

10.8

作为游戏设计师,我们将像小说家、平面设计师和电影制作人一样利用同理心,但我们也有自己的一套新的同理心互动方式。游戏是关于解决问题的,而同理心投射是一种有用的解决问题的方法。如果我能想象自己处于别人的位置,我就能更好地决定那个人能做些什么来解决某个问题。此外,在游戏中,你不只是把自己的感受投射到一个角色身上,你把你的整个决策能力投射到那个角色身上,并以一种在非交互式媒体中不可能的方式成为他们。我们将在第 20 章角色”中详细讨论这一点的含义。

As game designers, we will make use of empathy in the same ways that novelists, graphic artists, and filmmakers do, but we also have our own set of new empathic interactions. Games are about problem solving, and empathic projection is a useful method of problem solving. If I can imagine myself in the place of another, I can make better decisions about what that person can do to solve a particular problem. Also, in games, you don’t just project your feelings into a character, you project your entire decision-making capacity into that character and can become them in a way that isn’t possible in non-interactive media. We will discuss the implications of this in detail in Chapter 20: Characters.

想像力

Imagination

最美丽的世界总是通过想象进入的。

—海伦·凯勒

The most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.

—Hellen Keller

想象力将游戏融入玩家心中,从而将玩家带入游戏之中。

Imagination puts the player into the game by putting the game into the player.



10.9

FIGURE

10.9

你可能会认为,当我谈论玩家想象力的力量时,我可能指的是他们的创造性想象力和创造梦幻般幻想世界的能力——但我谈论的是一些更平凡的东西。我谈论的想象力是每个人都认为理所当然的神奇力量——每个人在日常交流和解决问题时都会使用的想象力。例如,如果我给你讲一个短篇故事,“邮递员昨天偷了我的车”,我实际上告诉你的很少,但你已经对发生的事情有了大致的了解。奇怪的是,你的画面充满了我没有在故事中包含的细节。看看形成的心理图像,并回答以下问题:

You might think, when I talk about the power of the player’s imagination, that I might mean their creative imagination and the power to make up dreamlike fantasy worlds—but I am talking about something much more mundane. The imagination I’m talking about is the miraculous power that everyone takes for granted—the everyday imagination that every person uses for communication and problem solving. For example, if I tell you a short story, “The mailman stole my car yesterday,” I have actually told you very little but already you have a picture of what happened. Weirdly, your picture is full of details that I didn’t include in my story. Take a look at the mental image that formed, and answer these questions:

  • 邮递员长什么样?

  • What did the mailman look like?

  • 当他偷我的车时,我的车在什么样的街区?

  • What kind of neighborhood was my car in when he stole it?

  • 那辆车是什么颜色的?

  • What color was the car?

  • 他是在一天中的什么时候偷走它的?

  • What time of day did he steal it?

  • 他是怎么偷走的?

  • How did he steal it?

  • 他为什么要偷它?

  • Why did he steal it?

现在,我没有告诉你任何这些事情,但你惊人的想象力编造了一堆细节,这样你就能更容易地想象我是告诉你。现在,如果我突然给你更多信息,比如“这不是一辆真正的汽车,而是一辆昂贵的模型玩具车”,你会迅速重新构想你的想象图像以适应你所听到的内容,你对前面问题的回答可能会相应地改变。这种自动填补空白的能力对于游戏设计非常重要,因为这意味着我们的游戏不需要提供每一个细节,玩家将能够填补其余部分。艺术在于知道你应该向玩家展示什么,以及你应该把什么留给他们的想象。

Now, I didn’t tell you any of those things, but your amazing imagination just made up a bunch of these details so that you could more easily think about what I was telling you. Now, if I suddenly give you more information, like “It wasn’t a real car, but an expensive model toy car,” you quickly reformulate your imaginary image to fit what you have heard, and your answers to the preceding questions might change correspondingly. This ability to automatically fill in gaps is very relevant for game design, for it means that our games don’t need to give every detail and players will be able to fill in the rest. The art comes in knowing what you should show the player and what you should leave to their imagination.

仔细想想,这种力量真是不可思议。我们的大脑只处理简化的现实模型,这意味着我们可以毫不费力地操纵这些模型,有时甚至能将其运用到现实中不可能实现的情形中。我能看到一把扶手椅,想象如果它的颜色或尺寸不同,如果它是用燕麦片做成的,或者如果它四处走动,它会是什么样子。我们用这种方式解决了很多问题。如果我让你想办法不用梯子换灯泡,你会立即开始想象可能的解决方案。

This power, when you think about it, is quite incredible. The fact that our brains only deal in simplified models of reality means that we can manipulate these models effortlessly, sometimes into situations that wouldn’t be possible in reality. I can see an armchair and imagine what it would look like if it were a different color or a different size, if it was made of oatmeal, or if it was walking around. We do a lot of problem solving this way. If I ask you to find a way to change a light bulb without a stepladder, you immediately start imagining possible solutions.

想象力有两个关键功能:第一是沟通(通常用于讲故事),第二是解决问题。由于游戏突出了这两项功能,游戏设计师必须了解如何让玩家的想象力成为讲故事的伙伴,并了解它能解决和不能解决的问题。

Imagination has two crucial functions: the first is communication (often for storytelling) and the second is problem solving. Since games prominently feature both of these, game designers must understand how to engage the player’s imagination as a storytelling partner, as well as having a sense of the problems it will and will not be able to solve.

人类思维确实是我们所知道的最迷人、最神奇、最复杂的东西。我们可能永远无法解开它的所有奥秘。我们对它的了解越多,我们就越有可能在其中创造出绝佳的体验,因为它是我们所有游戏体验发生的地方。永远不要忘记!你自己就具备这样的能力。你可以利用自己的建模、专注、同理心和想象力来了解这些能力是如何在玩家的头脑中运用的。这样,自我倾听可以成为倾听观众的关键。在下一章中,我们将进行一些自我倾听,以了解大脑为什么会被激励使用这些能力。

The human mind is truly the most fascinating, amazing, complex thing that we know. We may never unravel all of its mysteries. The more we know about it, the better a chance we’ll have of creating a great experience in it, for it is the site where all our game experiences take place. And never forget! You are equipped with one yourself. You can use your own powers of modeling, focus, empathy, and imagination to get to know how these powers are being used in the mind of your player. In this way, self-listening can be the key to listening to your audience. In the next chapter, we’ll do some of that self-listening to understand why the brain is motivated to use any of these powers at all.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 《心流:最优体验心理学》,作者:米哈里·契克森米哈赖。这是一本由心流研究者撰写的关于心流本质的可读性极强的探索性书籍。

  • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A highly readable exploration of the nature of flow written by its most prominent researcher.

第十一

CHAPTER ELEVEN

玩家的心态由玩家的动机所驱动

The Player’s Mind Is Driven by the Player’s Motivation



11.1

FIGURE

11.1

让我们从面对一个痛苦的事实开始这一章。

Let us begin this chapter by facing a painful truth.

游戏并不重要。

Games are not important.

当然,我们喜欢玩这些游戏。玩这些游戏时,我们会兴奋不已,并拥有美妙难忘的体验。但在我们生活的大局中,总有更重要的事情可以做。事实上,所有娱乐都是如此。毫不夸张地说,所有娱乐体验的目标都是让一些不重要的事情(比如一个球穿过一个环、一个关于虚构动物的故事,或者这张牌是国王还是王牌)看起来非常重要。这是欺骗吗?不是。最后,我们总是意识到它“只是一场游戏”。但在玩游戏的过程中,我们内心会发生一些事情,让我们觉得它远不止于此。有某种东西驱使我们,迫使我们关心这些琐碎的经历,就好像它们是生死攸关的事情一样。这就是动机的魔力。我们为什么做我们所做的事情的问题和哲学本身一样古老,但毫无疑问,游戏设计师似乎对人类动机有着独特的见解。

Sure, we like playing them. We get all excited about them and have wonderful, memorable experiences when playing them. But in the larger scheme of our lives, there is always something more important we could be doing. And, in fact, this is true for all entertainment. It is no exaggeration to say that the goal of all entertainment experiences is to take something unimportant (such as a ball going through a hoop, a story about imaginary animals, or whether this card is a king or an ace) and make it seem very important indeed. Is this deception? It is not. In the end, we are always aware that it is “just a game.” But during play, something happens in us that makes it feel like it is so much more. Something drives us and compels us to care about these trivial experiences as if they were matters of life and death. This is the magic of motivation. The question of why we do what we do is as old as philosophy itself, but there can be no doubt that game designers seem to have special insights into human motivation.

游戏设计师真正理解的东西实际上有些模糊,正是这种模糊性使得游戏设计如此具有挑战性。事实上,大多数设计师创造激励系统并不是通过对心理学复杂性的精通理解,而是通过直觉和实验,偶尔会取得成功。然而,任何关于动机的见解都可能有用,这是心理学研究与我们的设计目标高度一致的少数领域之一,所以让我们从这里开始吧。

The reality of what game designers actually understand is somewhat murkier, and it is this murkiness that makes game design so challenging. In truth, most designers create systems of motivation less through masterful understanding of the intricacies of psychology and more through gut instinct and experimentation, occasionally stumbling into success. However, any insights about motivation are potentially useful, and this is one of the rare areas where psychological research is well aligned with our design goals, so let’s start there.

需要…

Needs…

1943 年,心理学家亚伯拉罕·马斯洛发表了一篇题为《人类动机理论》的论文,提出了人类需求的层次结构。这通常以金字塔的形式呈现:

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a paper titled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which proposed a hierarchy of human needs. This is often presented as a pyramid:



11.2

FIGURE

11.2

这里的想法是,在较低层次的需求得到满足之前,人们没有动力去追求列表中的较高层次的需求。例如,如果有人快要饿死了,那么这比安全感更重要。如果一个人感觉不安全,他们就不会认真追求人际关系。如果一个人感觉不到爱和社会归属感,他们就不会追求能提高自尊心的东西。如果他们没有良好的自尊心,他们就无法发挥自己的才能(还记得那份重要的天赋吗?)去做他们“天生就该做的事”。

The idea here is that people are not motivated to pursue the higher-level needs on this list until the lower needs are satisfied. For example, if someone is starving to death, this is a priority over a feeling of safety. If someone doesn’t feel safe, they aren’t going to seriously pursue human relationships. If someone doesn’t feel love and social belonging, they aren’t going to pursue things that will boost their self-esteem. And if they don’t have good self-esteem, they will not be able to pursue their talents (remember the major gift?) to do what they were “born to do.”

如果你仔细思考,你就会发现这个模型可能存在一些例外,但总体而言,它的效果很好,可以成为讨论玩家游戏动机的非常有用的工具。思考不同的游戏活动以及它们在这个层次结构中的位置是很有趣的。许多游戏活动都与成就和精通有关,这使它们处于第四级,即自尊。但有些活动更低。看看这个层次结构,多人游戏的吸引力和持久力的原因突然变得清晰起来——它们比单人游戏满足了更多的基本需求,因此许多玩家会更有动力去做这些游戏也就不足为奇了。

If you think hard, you can come up with some possible exceptions to this model, but overall, it works well enough to be a very useful tool for discussing players’ motivations in games. It is interesting to think about different game activities and where they fall on this hierarchy. Many game activities are about achievement and mastery, which places them at level four, self-esteem. But some are lower. Looking at the hierarchy, the reasons for the appeal and staying power of multiplayer games suddenly become clear—they fulfill more basic needs than single player gameplay, so it shouldn’t be surprising that many players will feel more motivated to do them.

您能想到在层次结构中更底层的游戏活动,例如第二层或第一层吗?第五层的活动呢?可以说,Minecraft的成功来自于它对金字塔的完全覆盖。它以其幻想背景(您正在尝试收集资源以建造安全的庇护所)覆盖了最底层的两个层,并且作为一款关于掌握和创造力的多人游戏,它覆盖了最顶层的三个层。

Can you think of gameplay activities that go even farther down on the hierarchy, to the second or first level? How about activities on the fifth level? It can be argued that the success of Minecraft comes from its complete coverage of the pyramid. It covers the bottom two levels with its fantasy context (you are trying to gather resources to build safe shelter), and it covers the top three levels by being a multiplayer game about mastery and creativity.

任何能让你与他人建立联系的游戏都​​能让你感受到成就感,让你构建和创造能够表达自我的东西,这满足了第三、第四和第五个层次的需求。从这个角度来看,拥有在线社区和内容创建工具的游戏的受欢迎程度和持久力非常有意义。考虑不同层次如何相互影响也很有趣。但还有其他方式来思考需求。

Any game that connects you with other people lets you feel a sense of accomplishment, and lets you build and create things that let you express yourself fulfills the needs on the third, fourth, and fifth levels. Viewed from this perspective, the popularity and staying power of games with both online communities and content creation tools makes a lot of sense. It is also interesting to consider how the different levels can feed into one another. But there are other ways to think about needs.

…还有更多需求

…And More Needs

马斯洛的观点很有趣,但更多现代心理学家在需求问题上也持有新的观点。爱德华·德西和理查德·瑞安的研究与游戏特别相关,他们为发展所谓的自我决定理论做出了巨大贡献。不要让这个难听的名字吓到你。他们只是说,就像人类有生理需求一样,我们也有心理需求——不仅仅是欲望或欲望,而是实际需求。当这些需求得不到满足时,我们的心理就会变得不健康。令人惊讶的是,瑞安和德西认为我们恰恰有三种心理需求:

As interesting as Maslow’s point of view is, more modern psychologists have taken up new points of view on the question of needs. Particularly relevant to games is the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who have done a great deal to develop what is called self-determination theory. Don’t let that ugly name scare you. All they are saying is that just as humans have physical needs, we also have mental needs—not just wants or desires, but actual needs. When these needs are unmet, we become mentally unhealthy. Surprisingly, Ryan and Deci suggest that we have precisely three mental needs:

  1. 能力:我需要对某事感到满意。

  2. Competence: I need to feel good at something.

  3. 自主:我需要自由以我自己的方式做事。

  4. Autonomy: I need freedom to do things my own way.

  5. 关联性:我需要与其他人建立联系。

  6. Relatedness: I need to connect with other people.

这些要求简单得有些令人吃惊,但大量的证据支持了它们的有效性。我们很难不注意到游戏如何很好地满足了这三种需求。游戏旨在让你感到掌控一切。游戏让你可以自由地以自己想要的方式玩游戏。事实上,它们给予的自由远不止这些:因为它们只是游戏,所以你可以随时停止游戏。当然,大多数游戏都是为与其他人一起玩而设计的,以帮助建立社会联系和纽带。在后续章节中,我们将遇到分别针对能力、自主性和关联性的视角。但要记住一般需求的重要性,请采用这种视角。

These are somewhat startling in their simplicity, but a great body of evidence backs up their validity. And it is hard not to notice how well games tend to fulfill all three of these needs. Games are designed to make you feel mastery. Games give you freedom to play the way you want to play. In fact, they give more freedom than that: since they are only games, you can stop playing whenever you like. And, of course, most games are designed to be played with other people, to help form social connections and bonds. In future chapters, we will encounter lenses that individually address competence, autonomy, and relatedness. But to remember the importance of needs in general, take this lens.

内在动机与外在动机

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

思考动机的另一种方式是研究动机的来源。这对于游戏设计师尤其重要,因为游戏使用多种不同类型的动机来保持玩家的兴趣。从表面上看,这听起来很简单:当我想做某事时,我们说我是内在动机,但当有人付钱让我做某事时,我们说我是外在动机。这听起来可能很简单,但在游戏的现实中,事情很快就会变得复杂起来。我玩吃豆人是因为我喜欢在迷宫中赛跑和追逐的本能刺激(内在动机),还是因为游戏给了我积分(外在动机)?如果我真正受到高分的刺激呢?这是内在的,还是外在的,或者两者兼而有之?假设百事可乐创造了一款游戏,你喝了激浪就能获得积分和奖品。这显然是一种外在动机系统。但是,如果游戏变成了我和朋友之间的玩笑,我们通过赢得更多积分和奖品来互相竞争,从而获得一种本质上有趣的社交体验,那会怎样呢?有些人很快就将外在动机贬低为“低劣”的游戏设计,但精明的设计师知道,一种动机可以依附于另一种动机,就像藤蔓生长在棚架上一样。

Yet another way to think about motivation is by looking at where it comes from. This is particularly relevant for game designers, since games use so many different kinds of motivation to keep players interested. On the surface, it sounds simple: when I feel like doing something, we say I am intrinsically motivated, but when someone pays me to do something, we say I am extrinsically motivated. It may sound simple, but in the reality of games, things quickly become tangled. Do I play Pac-Man because I enjoy the visceral thrill of racing and chasing through the maze (intrinsic) or because the game gives me points (extrinsic)? What if I am truly motivated by the excitement of getting a high score? Is that intrinsic, or extrinsic, or both? Let’s say that PepsiCo creates a game where you get points and prizes for drinking Mountain Dew. That’s clearly a system of extrinsic motivation. But what if the game becomes a joke between my friends and I and we have an intrinsically fun social experience one-upping each other by winning more points and prizes? Some are quick to vilify extrinsic motivation as being “cheap” game design, but savvy designers know that one motivation can grow on another, like a vine growing on a trellis.

一些心理学家试图通过将内在动机和外在动机视为一个连续体来阐明它们的复杂性:

Some psychologists have tried to illustrate the complexity of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations by showing them as a continuum:



11.3

FIGURE

11.3

关键思想是“内在”和“外在”不是二元的,而是一个梯度,动机越多来自“你的真实自我”,它就越内在。作为一名游戏设计师,重要的是要了解游戏中不同动机的内在或外在程度,因为并非所有动机都是平等的,有时它们会以意想不到的方式相互作用。在一项著名的研究中,两组儿童被要求画画。第一组儿童每画一幅画都会得到报酬;第二组儿童则没有。如果你相信动机越多越好,那么你可能会认为付费组会画出更多更好的画。你可能只对了一半——他们确实画了更多画,但质量较低——画作不那么有趣和发人深省。但令人惊讶的是:当绘画时间到了,每个小组都被要求等待,而研究人员离开了房间。没有报酬的孩子,面前放着蜡笔和纸,自然会继续画画。然而,有报酬的孩子却没有。他们放下蜡笔,只是等待。看来,动机并不是纯粹的附加物;相反,将外在动机添加到本来就具有内在激励作用的东西会沿着连续体滑向外部,从而耗尽内在动力!对于那些相信任何活动都可以通过添加简单的积分、徽章和奖励而轻松“游戏化”的人来说,这会产生严重的影响。

The key idea is that “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” are not binary, but a gradient where the more the motivation comes from “your true self,” the more internal it is. As a game designer, it is important to have a sense of how internal or external the different motivations in your game really are, for all motivations are not created equal, and sometimes they can interact in unexpected ways. In one famous study, two groups of children were asked to draw pictures. The first group was paid for each picture they created; the second group was not. If you believe the idea that more motivation is better, then you might expect that the paid group would draw more pictures and better pictures. And you would be half right—they did draw more pictures, but the quality was lower—the pictures were not as interesting and thoughtful. But here’s the surprising part: when drawing time was up, each group was asked to wait, while the researchers left the room. The unpaid children, with crayons and paper in front of them, naturally kept drawing. The paid children, however, did not. They put their crayons down and just waited. It would seem motivation is not purely additive; rather, the act of adding extrinsic motivation to something that is already intrinsically motivating slides it along the continuum toward the external, draining away the intrinsic motivation! This has serious repercussions for those who believe that any activity can be easily “gamified” by adding simple points, badges, and rewards.

想要与必须

Wanna vs. Hafta

第 4 章游戏中,我们讨论了态度的改变如何将工作变成游戏,反之亦然。毫无疑问,这与动机有着密切的联系。回想一下工厂工人的例子,他每天都把打破自己的制造记录当作游戏,这极大地提高了他的积极性和参与度。究竟发生了什么?当然,有人可能会说他的动机变得更加内在。他不再关注完成工作(获得报酬)的外部奖励,而是更加关注更内在的东西——打破个人记录,因为他想这样做,因此他的动机更多地来自于他自己。

In Chapter 4: Game, we talked about how a change in attitude can turn work into play, and vice versa. This, without a doubt, is meaningfully connected to motivation. Think back to the example of the factory worker who made a game of trying to beat his manufacturing record each day and how it vastly increased his motivation and his engagement. What happened there, exactly? Certainly, one could argue that his motivation became more internal. He was less focused on the external reward for doing his job (getting paid) and became more focused on something more internal—beating his personal record, because he wanted to, and thus his motivation became more his own.

但这里还有别的因素在起作用。直到我读到一本神经科学的书时,我才完全理解了这一点。这本书指出,追求快乐和避免痛苦是大脑中的两个不同系统。它们不是简单的从痛苦到快乐的连续过程,而是两组不同的动机回路。然而,我们常常把追求快乐和避免痛苦归为一类,我们称之为“动机”,然后就不再考虑它了。但当我们想把它们分开时,有趣的事情就浮现出来了。

But there is something else at work here, too. It was something that I did not fully comprehend until I was reading a book about neuroscience that pointed out that pleasure seeking and pain avoiding are two different systems in the brain. They are not a simple continuum of pain to pleasure, but two different sets of motivational circuits. So often, though, we just group pleasure seeking and pain avoiding into one lump we call “motivation” and think no more about it. But when we think to separate them, interesting things come to light.

考虑以下示例时,这与游戏的相关性变得清晰起来。假设我创办了一家新的软件公司:Big Red Button Software。我们的第一款产品是一种新型报税软件。我们会在邮件中向您发送一个大红色按钮,您按下它,然后砰!您的税款会立即准备就绪,保证您获得法律允许的最高退税。我想您会同意这是一款非常棒的软件产品,我很高兴您喜欢它,因为我们正准备发布我们的第二款产品:这是一款名为《愤怒的小鸟》的游戏。同样,我们会在邮件中向您发送一个大红色按钮,这一次当您按下它时,砰!您立即获胜!

The relevance of this to games becomes clear when considering the following example. Let’s say I start a new software company: Big Red Button Software. Our first product is a new kind of tax preparation software. We send you a big red button in the mail, you push it, and bam! Your taxes are instantly prepared, guaranteeing you the maximum refund allowable by law. I suspect you would agree that is a pretty amazing software product, and I’m glad you like it, because we are getting ready to release our second product: it’s a game called Angry Birds. Again, we send you a big red button in the mail, and this time when you push it, bam! You instantly win!

但这并不是什么了不起的软件产品,不是吗?事实上,它可能是有史以来最糟糕的游戏。是什么让这两个应用程序如此截然不同?很简单:我“必须”纳税,但我“想”玩游戏。纳税都是为了避免痛苦。我纳税不是因为我喜欢,也不是因为有人付钱让我纳税,而是因为如果我不纳税,我会遭受高额罚款,甚至可能入狱。但玩游戏完全是为了寻求快乐。不玩游戏不会受到惩罚——我玩游戏只是因为我喜欢。这与活动无关,而是与我们对待它的态度有关。我的一个朋友喜欢准备税务表格,同样,电子游戏也让他感到无聊。对他来说,纳税是一项“想”做的事,而电子游戏则是“必须”做的事。

But that’s not such an amazing software product, is it? In fact, it might be the worst game ever. What is it that makes these two applications so radically different? Simply this: I “hafta” do my taxes, but I “wanna” play a game. Taxes are all about pain avoidance. I don’t do them because I enjoy them, or because someone is paying me to do them, but because I’ll suffer heavy fines and maybe go to jail if I don’t do them. But playing a game is all about pleasure seeking. There is no penalty for not playing—I do it simply because I enjoy doing it. This has nothing to do with the activity and everything to do with our attitude toward it. A friend of mine loves preparing tax forms, and likewise, videogames bore him. For him, taxes are a “wanna” activity, and videogames are a “hafta.”

那么我们为什么要关心这个呢?因为虽然许多游戏动机都是为了寻求快乐,但并非所有游戏动机都是如此——许多游戏动机都集中在避免痛苦上。当你躲避敌人并“试图不死”时,你就处于避免痛苦模式。当你收集金星并获得巧妙的组合时,你就处于寻求快乐的模式。它们都是有效的动机,实际上可以很好地结合起来。然而,有时这种组合会失去平衡。“免费游戏”通常一开始完全专注于寻求快乐:丰厚的奖励、意想不到的奖励和令人兴奋的动画。但随着时间的推移,它们会积累义务——在一定时间内回来,否则会失去积分、邀请更多朋友或错过奖品。渐渐地,这些游戏从寻求快乐的动机滑向避免痛苦的动机。它们让你不断回来,但你并不总是感觉很好。出于这个原因,正如设计师 Sheri Graner Ray 所说,“人们不会停止玩这些游戏,而是会与它们分道扬镳。”许多魔兽世界玩家都有过类似的经历。他们开始玩游戏是因为有很多有趣的事情可以做,其中之一就是加入公会,享受团队合作的友谊和情谊。但有时公会领导为了成功会强迫成员玩得比他们想要的还要多。玩家想要避免公会的耻辱之痛,所以他们不断出现,渐渐地,玩游戏开始感觉像是一件你“不得不”做的事情。

So why do we care about this? Because while many gameplaying motivations are about pleasure seeking, not all of them are—many are centered on pain avoidance. When you are avoiding enemies and “trying not to die,” you are in pain avoidance mode. When you are scooping up gold stars and scoring clever combos, you are in pleasure-seeking mode. They are both valid kinds of motivation and can actually work well in combination. However, sometimes the combination gets out of balance. “Free to play” games often begin entirely focused on pleasure seeking: big rewards, unexpected bonuses, and exciting animations. But over time, they build up obligations—come back by a certain time or lose points, invite more friends or miss out on prizes. Gradually, these games slide from pleasure-seeking motivations to pain avoidance motivations. They keep you coming back, but you don’t always feel as good about it. For this reason, as designer Sheri Graner Ray puts it, “People don’t just stop playing these games, they divorce them.” Many World of Warcraft players have had similar experiences. They begin playing because there are so many fun things to do, one of which is to join a guild and enjoy the friendship and camaraderie of team play. But sometimes guild leaders, in a desire to succeed, pressure their members to play more than they want to. Players want to avoid the pain of shame from their guild, so they keep showing up, and gradually, playing starts to feel like something you “hafta” do.

要想从有趣的角度看待游戏中的动机,请尝试将每个动机放在一个矩阵中,其中一个轴是内部/外部,另一个轴是不得不/想要。这再次说明了人类动机可以多么复杂和有趣。

For an interesting perspective on the motivations in your game, try putting each one on a matrix, where one axis is internal/external and the other is hafta/wanna. It is one more illustration of how richly complex and interesting human motivation can be.



11.4

FIGURE

11.4

如果有人告诉你人类动机很简单,请保持警惕,因为如果你忽视了它的复杂性,后果将不堪设想。借助这个镜头,你就能记住这一点。

Be wary of those who tell you that human motivation is a simple thing, for you ignore its complexity at your peril. Take this lens to help you remember.

新奇

Novelty

毫无疑问,这个世界流行的就是新奇的事物。

—马克·吐温

Unquestionably, the popular thing in this world is novelty.

—Mark Twain

在游戏设计领域,新颖性作为动机的重要性怎么强调也不为过。人类是天生的探索者,我们总是对新事物感兴趣。如果我们最关心的是质量,那么我们的书店里就会摆满经典作品,这些作品的质量是经过时间考验的。然而,经典作品却被放在书架后面,而大多数待售书籍都是全新的。对于游戏来说更是如此。关于游戏的讨论主要围绕什么是新的以及接下来会发生什么。对新颖性的渴望是玩家购买游戏的很大一部分动机。今天要花数百美元的游戏和系统明天在 eBay 上可能只需几美分就能买到。对新颖性的渴望也是让玩家继续玩下去的重要原因——相信下一关会有新的东西是完成这一关的强大动力。

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of novelty as motivation in the realm of game design. Human beings are natural explorers, and we are always interested in that which is new. If quality was our primary concern, our bookstores would be full of classics whose quality is time tested and true. Instead, classics get a dusty shelf in the back, while the majority of books for sale are brand new. And this is even truer for games. Conversation about games is dominated by what is new and what is coming next. Thirst for novelty is a tremendous part of what motivates players to purchase games. Games and systems that cost hundreds of dollars today will be sold for pennies on eBay tomorrow. Thirst for novelty is also big part of what keeps players playing—believing there is something new on the next level is a powerful incentive to finish this one.

游戏中最强大的创新之一就是让你以全新方式思考的创新。《传送门》就是一个很好的例子,它有一个奇怪的机制,即在天花板、墙壁和地板上射出相连的“洞”。它的广告口号“现在你正在用传送门思考”,非常贴切,因为传送门的机制这款游戏让你以全新的方式思考世界。尽管世界还是老样子,但你却拥有了一种与之互动的新方式——一种你可能从未想过的方式,因为它似乎是不可能的。但突然间,这样做不仅是可能的,而且是刻不容缓的。新颖的思维方式会以一种令人难以置信的回报方式拓展我们的大脑。

One of the most powerful kinds of novelty in games is novelty that makes you think in a whole new way. Portal is a great example of this, with its bizarre mechanic of shooting connected “holes” into ceilings, walls, and floors. Its advertising slogan, “Now you’re thinking with portals,” is very appropriate, because the mechanics of the game make you think about the world in a whole new way. Even though it’s the same old world, you have a new way of interacting with it—one that probably never occurred to you because it didn’t seem possible. But suddenly it is not only possible but urgent that you do so. Novel ways of thinking stretch our brains in a way that can feel incredibly rewarding.

但请记住,过于新颖也是有原因的。每个成功的游戏都是新颖性和熟悉性的混合体。许多引人入胜的游戏都因领先时代而失败。更大的危险是,你的游戏可能有新颖性,但没有其他品质来赋予它持久力。小心不要自欺欺人地认为新颖性就足够了。新颖性可以引起人们的注意并推动早期销售,但如果没有坚实的游戏基础,你的玩家就会像他们突然出现一样突然消失。

Keep in mind, however, that there is such a thing as being too novel. Every successful game is a mix of the novel and the familiar. Many fascinating games have failed by being ahead of their time. An even greater danger is that your game may have novelty, but no other qualities to give it staying power. Be cautious not to fool yourself that novelty is enough. Novelty will get the word out and drive early sales, but if there is not a solid game underneath, your players will vanish as suddenly as they arrived.

人们很容易对这个追求新奇而非质量的社会的悲惨状况摇头,但寻求和抓住新奇是人类探索可能性、追求更美好世界的方式。所以,不要对人类对新奇事物永不满足的渴望感到绝望——相反,要拥抱它,给人们他们想要的东西:他们从未体验过的东西。只要确保当新奇感消失时,仍然有值得关心的东西。带上这个镜头,确保你记住。

It is easy to shake one’s head at the sad state of a society that demands novelty over quality, but seeking and seizing novelty is the way the human race explores what is possible, ever questing for a better world. So do not despair at man’s insatiable appetite for novelty—instead, embrace it, and give the people what they want: something they have never experienced before. Just be sure that when the novelty wears off, there is still something there to care about. Take this lens to be sure you remember.

判断

Judgment

马斯洛层次结构的第四层是自尊,与游戏联系最为密切。但为什么呢?每个人普遍存在的一个深层需求就是需要被评判。这听起来可能不对——人们不是讨厌被评判吗?他们不讨厌——他们只是讨厌被不公平地评判。我们内心深处需要知道我们与别人相比如何。当我们对自己的评价不满意时,我们会努力工作,直到得到有利的评价。游戏是客观评判的优秀系统,这是游戏最吸引人的品质之一。

The fourth level of Maslow’s hierarchy, self-esteem, is the one most intimately connected to games. But why? One deep need common to everyone is the need to be judged. This might sound wrong—don’t people hate being judged? They don’t—they only hate being judged unfairly. We have a deep inner need to know how we stack up. And when we aren’t happy with how we are judged, we work hard until we are judged favorably. The fact that games are excellent systems for objective judgment is one of their most appealing qualities.

本章只是触及了人类游戏动机的本质。但别担心——这不是我们可以放弃的话题。创造伟大游戏的每个方面最终都与人类动机有关。把这当作一个起点,一个基础,在此基础上,你将越来越深入地理解我们为什么做我们所做的事情。让我们通过研究游戏运作的机制来迈出下一步。

This chapter has only scratched the surface of the nature of human motivation with regard to games. But don’t worry—it isn’t a topic we can abandon. Every aspect of creating great games ultimately relates back to human motivation. Consider this a starting point, a foundation on which you will build greater and greater understanding of why we do what we do. Let’s take the next step by examining the mechanisms that make games work.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • Scott Rigby 和 Richard M. Ryan 著的《沉迷游戏》。这是一本关于自我决定理论与游戏运作原理之间关系的深刻指南。

  • Glued to Games by Scott Rigby and Richard M. Ryan. An insightful guide to the relationship between self-determination theory and what makes games work.

  • 阿尔菲·科恩的《奖励的惩罚》。这本书对大量有关外在奖励弊端的研究进行了出色的概述。

  • Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. This book is an excellent overview of the vast body of research about the downsides of extrinsic rewards.

  • 约翰马歇尔·里夫 (Johnmarshall Reeve) 著《理解动机和情绪》。如果您已经准备好超越关于动机和情绪如何发挥作用的原始概念,那么这本大学水平的教材将是一本有关该主题的心理学研究领域的扎实入门读物。

  • Understanding Motivation and Emotion by Johnmarshall Reeve. If you are ready to get beyond primitive notions of how motivation and emotion work, this college-level text is a solid introduction to the world of psychological research on the subject.

第十二

CHAPTER TWELVE

有些元素是游戏机制

Some Elements Are Game Mechanics



12.1

FIGURE

12.1

我们已经谈了很多关于设计师、玩家和游戏体验的内容。现在是时候谈谈游戏的真正构成了。游戏设计师必须学会使用透视眼光,看透游戏的外表,快速辨别游戏机制所定义的骨架。

We have talked a lot about designers, players, and the experience of gameplaying. It is time to talk nuts and bolts about what games are really made of. Game designers must learn to use their x-ray vision to be able to see past the skin of a game and quickly discern the skeleton, which is defined by the game mechanics.

但是这些神秘的机制是什么呢?

But what are these mysterious mechanics?

游戏机制是游戏的真正核心。当所有美学、技术和故事都被剥离后,它们仍然是互动和关系。

Game mechanics are the core of what a game truly is. They are the interactions and relationships that remain when all of the aesthetics, technology, and story are stripped away.

与游戏设计中的许多事物一样,我们没有一个普遍认可的游戏机制分类法。其中一个原因是,即使是简单的游戏,游戏机制也往往非常复杂,很难解开。试图将这些复杂机制简化到完美的数学理解程度,会导致描述系统明显不完整。经济“博弈论”就是一个例子。你可能会认为,有了“博弈论”这样的名字,它对游戏设计师来说会非常有用,但事实上,它只能处理这种简单的系统,因此很少用于设计真正的游戏。

As with many things in game design, we do not have a universally agreed-upon taxonomy of game mechanics. One reason for this is that the mechanics of gameplay, even for simple games, tend to be quite complex and very difficult to disentangle. Attempts at simplifying these complex mechanics to the point of perfect mathematical understanding result in systems of description that are obviously incomplete. Economic “game theory” is an example of this. You would think with a name like “game theory,” it would be of great use to game designers, but in truth, it can only handle such simple systems that it is seldom useful for designing real games.

但游戏机制分类法不完整还有另一个原因。在一个层面上,游戏机制是非常客观、明确陈述的规则集。但在另一个层面上,它们涉及一些更神秘的东西。之前,我们讨论了大脑如何将所有游戏分解为可以轻松操纵的心理模型。游戏机制的一部分必然涉及描述这些心理模型的结构。由于这些模型主要存在于潜意识的黑暗中,我们很难想出一个明确的分析分类法来说明它们是如何工作的。

But there is another reason that taxonomies of game mechanics are incomplete. On one level, game mechanics are very objective, clearly stated sets of rules. On another level, though, they involve something more mysterious. Earlier, we discussed how the mind breaks down all games into mental models that it can easily manipulate. Part of game mechanics necessarily involves describing the structure of these mental models. Since these exist largely in the darkness of the subconscious mind, it is hard for us come up with a well-defined analytical taxonomy of how they work.

但这并不意味着我们不应该尝试。一些作者从非常学术的角度来处理这个问题,他们更关心哲学上严密的分析,而不是对设计师有用的分析。我们不能承受这种迂腐。为了知识而知识是一件好事,但我们的兴趣是为了伟大的游戏而知识,即使这意味着分类法有一些灰色地带。话虽如此,我还是介绍了我用来对游戏机制进行分类的分类法。这些机制大致分为七大类,每一种都可以为你的游戏设计提供有用的见解。

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Some authors have approached this problem from a very academic perspective, more concerned with an analysis that is philosophically watertight than with one that might be useful to designers. We can’t afford this kind of pedantry. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a fine thing, but our interest is in knowledge for the sake of great games, even if it means a taxonomy that has some gray areas. With that said, I present the taxonomy that I use to classify game mechanics. These mechanics fall largely into seven main categories, and each one can provide useful insights on your game design.

机制 1:空间

Mechanic 1: Space

每款游戏都会在某种空间中发生。这种空间就是游戏玩法的“魔法圈”。它定义了游戏中可能存在的各个地方以及这些地方彼此之间的关系。作为一种游戏机制,空间是一种数学构造。我们需要剥离所有视觉效果、所有美学,只看游戏空间的抽象构造。

Every game takes place in some kind of space. This space is the “magic circle” of gameplay. It defines the various places that can exist in a game and how those places are related to one another. As a game mechanic, space is a mathematical construct. We need to strip away all visuals, all aesthetics, and simply look at the abstract construction of a game’s space.

对于描述这些抽象、简化的游戏空间,没有硬性规定。不过,一般来说,游戏空间

There are no hard and fast rules for describing these abstract, stripped-down game spaces. Generally, though, game spaces

  1. 离散的或连续的

  2. Are either discrete or continuous

  3. 具有一定数量的维度

  4. Have some number of dimensions

  5. 有边界区域,可能连通也可能不连通

  6. Have bounded areas that may or may not be connected

例如,井字游戏的棋盘是离散的和 2D 的。我们所说的“离散”是什么意思?好吧,尽管我们通常像这样画井字棋盘:

The game of tic-tac-toe, for example, features a board that is discrete and 2D. What do we mean by “discrete”? Well, even though we commonly draw a tic-tac-toe board like this:



12.2

FIGURE

12.2

它实际上不是一个连续的空间,因为我们只关心边界,而不关心每个单元格内的空间。无论你把你的 X…

It is not really a continuous space, because we only care about boundaries, not the space within each cell. Whether you put your X…



12.3

FIGURE

12.3



12.4

FIGURE

12.4



12.5

FIGURE

12.5

这其实并不重要——从游戏的角度来看,所有这些都是等价的。但是如果你把你的 X 放在这里:

It doesn’t really matter—all those are equivalent in terms of the game. But if you put your X here:



12.6

FIGURE

12.6

那完全是另一回事。因此,尽管玩家可以在连续的 2D 空间中无数个位置留下标记,但游戏中真正有意义的离散位置只有九个。从某种意义上说,我们实际上有九个零维单元,它们在 2D 网格中相互连接,如下所示:

That is another matter entirely. So, even though the players can make their marks in an infinite number of places in a continuous 2D space, there are really only nine discrete places that have any actual meaning in the game. In a sense, we really have nine zero-dimensional cells, connected to each other in a 2D grid, like this:



12.7

FIGURE

12.7

每个圆圈代表一个零维位置,每条线表示哪些位置相互连接。在井字游戏中,没有从一个位置移动到另一个位置,但相邻性非常重要。没有相邻性,它就只是九个不相连的点。有了相邻性,它就变成了一个离散的二维空间,有清晰的边界——这个空间有三个单元格宽,三个单元格高。棋盘的空间类似,只是它是一个 8×8 的空间。

Each circle represents a zero-dimensional place, and each line shows which places are connected to each other. In tic-tac-toe, there is no movement from place to place, but adjacency is very important. Without adjacency, it would just be nine disconnected points. With the adjacency, it becomes a discrete 2D space, with clear boundaries—the space is three cells wide and three cells high. The space for a chessboard is similar, except that it is an 8 × 8 space.

具有精美美感的游戏可能会让您误以为其功能空间比实际更复杂。以大富翁棋盘为例。

A game with fancy aesthetics can fool you into thinking that its functional space is more complex than it really is. Consider a Monopoly board.

乍一看,你可能会说它是一个离散的二维空间,就像棋盘一样,中间的大多数单元格都缺失了。但它可以更简单地表示为一维空间——一条由四十个离散点组成的线,以循环的方式连接到自身。当然,在游戏板上,角落空间看起来很特殊,因为它们更大,但从功能上讲这并不重要,因为每个游戏方块都是零维空间。多个游戏棋子可以位于一个游戏方块中,但它们在该方块内的相对位置毫无意义。

At first glance, you might say it is a discrete 2D space, like a chessboard, with most of the middle cells missing. But it can be more simply represented as a 1D space—a single line of forty discrete points, which connects to itself in a loop. Sure, on the game board, the corner spaces look special because they are bigger, but functionally that doesn’t matter, since each game square is a zero-dimensional space. Multiple game pieces can be in a single game square, but their relative positions within that square are meaningless.

但并非所有游戏空间都是离散的。台球桌就是连续二维空间的一个例子。它有固定的长度和宽度,球可以在桌子上自由移动,从墙上弹起或落入固定位置的洞中。每个人都会同意空间是连续的,但它是二维的吗?由于聪明的玩家有时可以让球离开桌子并互相跳过,你当然可以说这实际上是一个三维游戏空间,出于某些目的,这样想很有用。这些抽象的功能空间没有硬性规定。在设计新游戏时,有时将空间视为二维会很有用,有时将其视为三维会更有用。连续与离散也是如此。将游戏分解为功能空间的目的是让你更容易思考它,而不会受到美学或现实世界的干扰。如果您正在考虑将足球比赛修改为具有新边界的运动场,那么您可能会从二维连续空间的角度来考虑这个问题。

But not all game spaces are discrete. A pool table is an example of a continuous 2D space. It has a fixed length and width, and the balls can freely move about on the table, ricocheting off of the walls or falling into the holes, which are in fixed positions. Everyone would agree that the space is continuous, but is it 2D? Since clever players can sometimes cause the balls to leave the table and hop over each other, you could certainly argue that this is really a 3D game space, and for some purposes, it is useful to think of it that way. There are no hard and fast rules for these abstract functional spaces. When designing a new game, there are times it will be useful for you to think of your space as 2D and there are times when thinking of it as 3D is more useful. The same goes for continuous vs. discrete. The purpose of stripping down a game into a functional space is so that you can more easily think about it, without the distractions of aesthetics or the real world. If you are thinking about modifying the game of soccer to a playing field with new boundaries, you will probably think about it in terms of a 2D continuous space.



12.8

FIGURE

12.8

但是,如果您正在考虑修改球门的高度,或改变球员踢球高度的规则,或在球场上添加山丘和山谷,那么将其视为连续的 3D 空间会很有用。

But if you are thinking about modifying the height of the goal, or changing the rules about how high the players can kick the ball, or adding hills and valleys to the field, it is useful to think of it as a continuous 3D space instead.



12.9

FIGURE

12.9

有时你甚至会把足球场看作一个独立的空间——把它分成九个主要比赛区域,左边还有两个额外的区域右边代表进球。例如,如果你正在分析球场不同部分发生的不同类型的比赛,这种思维模式可能会很有用。重要的是,你要提出游戏空间的抽象模型,以帮助你更好地理解游戏的相互关系。

There might even be times you think about a soccer field as a discrete space—breaking it up into, say, nine major areas of play, with two extra areas on the left and right representing the goals. This mode of thinking might prove useful if you are analyzing the different kinds of play that take place in different parts of the field, for example. The important thing is that you come up with abstract models of your game space that help you better understand the interrelationships of your game.

嵌套空间

Nested Spaces



12.10

FIGURE

12.10

许多游戏空间比我们在这里看到的例子更复杂。它们通常以“空间中的空间”为特色。基于计算机的奇幻角色扮演游戏就是一个很好的例子。它们中的大多数都以连续且 2D 的“户外空间”为特色。在这个空间中旅行的玩家有时会遇到代表城镇、洞穴或城堡的小图标。玩家可以进入这些完全独立的空间,这些空间实际上与“户外空间”没有任何联系,但通过网关图标即可。当然,这在地理上是不现实的 - 但它符合我们对空间的思维模型 - 当我们在室内时,我们会考虑我们所在的建筑物内的空间,而很少考虑它与外部空间的具体关系。因此,这些“空间中的空间”通常是创建复杂世界的简单表示的好方法。

Many game spaces are more complex than the examples we have looked at here. Often, they feature “spaces within spaces.” Computer-based fantasy role-playing games are a good example of this. Most of them feature an “outdoor space” that is continuous and 2D. A player traveling this space sometimes encounters little icons representing towns, or caves, or castles. Players can enter these as completely separate spaces, not really connected in any way to the “outdoor space” but through the gateway icon. This is not geographically realistic, of course—but it matches our mental models of how we think about spaces—when we are indoors we think about the space inside the building we are in, with little thought to how it exactly relates to the space outside. For this reason, these “spaces within spaces” are often a great way to create a simple representation of a complex world.

零维度

Zero Dimensions

所有游戏都是在空间中进行的吗?考虑一下“二十个问题”这样的游戏,其中一个玩家想出一个物体,另一个玩家问“是或否”问题,试图猜出它是什么。没有游戏板,也没有任何东西移动——游戏只是两个人在说话。你可能会说这个游戏没有空间。另一方面,你可能会发现将游戏想象成发生在一个如图 12.11所示的空间中很有用。

Does every game take place in a space? Consider a game like “Twenty Questions,” where one player thinks of an object, and the other player asks “yes or no” questions trying to guess what it is. There is no game board and nothing moves—the game is just two people talking. You might argue that this game has no space. On the other hand, you might find it useful to think of the game happening in a space that looks like Figure 12.11.



12.11

FIGURE

12.11

回答者的头脑包含秘密对象。提问者的头脑是所有先前答案的权衡之处,他们之间的对话空间是他们交换信息的方式。每个游戏都有某种信息或“状态”(正如我们稍后将在机制 2 中看到的那样),并且它必须存在于某个地方。因此,即使游戏发生在零维的单点上,将其视为一个空间也是有用的。您可能会发现,为一个空间看似微不足道的游戏找出一个抽象模型可能会让您对它产生令人惊讶的见解。

The mind of the answerer contains the secret object. The mind of the questioner is where all the weighing of the previous answers is going on, and the conversation space between them is how they exchange information. Every game has some kind of information or “state” (as we’ll see later in Mechanic 2), and this has to exist somewhere. So, even if a game takes place in a single point of zero dimensions, it can be useful to think of it as a space. You may find that figuring out an abstract model for a game whose space seems to be trivial may lead you to insights about it that surprise you.

能够以功能抽象的角度思考游戏空间是设计师必不可少的视角,这就是镜头#26

Being able to think about the space of your game in functional abstract terms is an essential perspective for a designer, and it is Lens #26.

在思考游戏空间时,很容易被美学所左右。有很多方法可以表示你的游戏空间,只要它们对你有用,它们都是很好的。当你能用这些纯粹抽象的术语来思考你的空间时,它帮助您摆脱对现实世界的假设,让您专注于您希望看到的游戏互动类型。当然,一旦您操纵了抽象空间,并对其布局感到满意,您就会想将美学应用于其中。功能空间镜头与镜头 #10全息设计配合得很好。如果您可以同时看到您的抽象功能空间和玩家将体验到的美学空间,以及它们如何相互关联,您就可以对游戏世界的形状做出自信的决定。

When thinking about game spaces, it is easy to be swayed by aesthetics. There are many ways to represent your game space, and they are all good, as long as they work for you. When you can think of your space in these pure abstract terms, it helps you let go of assumptions about the real world, and it lets you focus on the kinds of gameplay interactions you would like to see. Of course, once you have manipulated the abstract space so that you are happy with its layout, you will want to apply aesthetics to it. The Lens of Functional Space works quite well with Lens #10: Holographic Design. If you can simultaneously see your abstract functional space and the aesthetic space the player will experience, as well as how they interrelate, you can make confident decisions about the shape of your game’s world.

机制 2:时间

Mechanic 2: Time

在现实世界中,时间是最神秘的维度。我们违背自己的意愿穿越时间,不断前进,无法停止、转身、减速或加速。在游戏世界中,我们经常尝试通过创建玩具世界来弥补这种缺乏控制的缺陷,让我们像神一样玩弄时间。

In the real world, time is the most mysterious of dimensions. Against our will, we travel through it, ever forward, with no way to stop, turn around, slow down, or speed up. In the world of games, we often try to remedy this lack of control by creating toy worlds that let us play with time like gods.

离散时间与连续时间

Discrete and Continuous Time

正如游戏中的空间可以是离散的也可以是连续的,时间也可以是离散的。我们有一个词来表示游戏中离散时间的单位:“回合”。一般来说,在回合制游戏中,时间并不重要。每个回合都算作一个离散的时间单位,就游戏而言,回合之间的时间是不存在的。例如,拼字游戏通常被记录为一系列动作,没有记录每一步花费的时间,因为实际时钟时间与游戏机制无关。

Just as space in games can be discrete or continuous, so can time. We have a word for the unit of discrete time in a game: the “turn.” Generally, in turn-based games, time matters little. Each turn counts as a discrete unit of time, and the time between turns, as far as the game is concerned, doesn’t exist. Scrabble games, for example, are generally recorded as a series of moves, with no record of the amount of time that each move took, because real clock time is irrelevant to the game mechanics.

当然,许多游戏不是回合制的,而是连续时间的。大多数动作类电子游戏都是这样,大多数体育运动也是如此。有些游戏使用混合时间系统。锦标赛象棋是回合制的,但有一个连续时钟来限制每个玩家的时间。

Of course, there are many games that are not turn based, but instead operate in continuous time. Most action videogames are this way, as are most sports. And some games use a mix of time systems. Tournament chess is turn-based but has a continuous clock to place time limits on each player.

时钟与比赛

Clocks and Races

许多游戏都使用各种类型的时钟,为各种事情设定绝对时间限制。Boggle 中使用的“沙漏”、美式足球中的比赛时钟,甚至《大金刚》中马里奥跳跃的持续时间都是不同类型的“时钟”机制,旨在通过绝对时间测量来限制游戏玩法。正如可以有嵌套空间一样,有时时间也是嵌套的。例如,篮球比赛通常使用比赛时钟来限制总比赛时间,但也使用更短的“投篮时钟”来帮助确保玩家承担更多风险,保持游戏的趣味性。

Clocks of varying types are used in many games, to set absolute time limits for all kinds of things. The “sand timer” used in Boggle, the game clock in American football, and even the duration of Mario’s jump in Donkey Kong are different kinds of “clock” mechanisms, designed to limit gameplay through absolute measure of time. Just as there can be nested spaces, sometimes time is nested, as well. Basketball, for instance, is often played with a game clock to limit the length of total play but also with a much shorter “shot clock” to help ensure players take more risks, keeping the gameplay interesting.

其他时间测量方法则更为相对——我们通常将其称为“比赛”。在比赛中,没有固定的时间限制,而是有压力要比其他选手更快。有时这很明显,比如在汽车比赛中,但其他竞赛更加微妙,比如我在《太空侵略者》中的竞赛,就是在所有入侵的外星人接触地面之前消灭他们。

Other measures of time are more relative—we usually refer to these as “races.” In the case of a race, there is not a fixed time limit, but rather pressure to be faster than another player. Sometimes this is very obvious, like in an auto race, but other races are more subtle, such as my race in Space Invaders to destroy all the invading aliens before they manage to touch the ground.

当然,在很多游戏中,时间并不是一个限制因素,但它仍然是一个有意义的因素。例如,在棒球比赛中,局数没有时间限制,但如果比赛时间过长,投手就会精疲力竭,因此时间是比赛中的一个重要部分。在第 13 章平衡中,我们将讨论可以控制比赛时间的不同游戏因素。

There are many games, of course, where time is not a limiting factor, but it is still a meaningful factor. In baseball, for example, innings are not timed, but if the game goes on too long, it can exhaust the pitcher, making time an important part of the game. In Chapter 13: Balance, we will talk about different game factors that can control how long a game takes to play.

控制时间

Controlling Time

游戏让我们有机会做在现实世界中永远无法做到的事情:控制时间。这以多种有趣的方式发生。有时我们会完全停止时间,例如在体育比赛中叫“暂停”或在视频游戏中按下“暂停”按钮。偶尔,我们也会加快时间,就像在《文明》等游戏中一样,这样我们就可以在几秒钟内看到几年过去。但最常见的是,我们让时间倒转,这就是每次你在视频游戏中死亡并返回上一个检查点时发生的情况。有些游戏,例如《时空幻境》,甚至将操纵游戏时间作为核心机制。

Games give us the chance to do something we can never do in the real world: control time. This happens in a number of fascinating ways. Sometimes we stop time completely, as when a “time-out” is called in sporting match or when the “pause” button is pushed on a videogame. Occasionally, we speed up time, as happens in games like Civilization, so that we can see years pass in just seconds. But most often, we rewind time, which is what happens every time you die in a videogame and return to a previous checkpoint. Some games, such as Braid, go so far as to make manipulation of game time a central mechanic.

由于时间是无形的、不可阻挡的,所以很容易被遗忘。带上这个镜头,帮助你记住。

Since time is invisible and unstoppable, it is easy to forget. Take this lens to help you remember.

机制 3:对象

Mechanic 3: Objects

一个没有任何东西的空间,嗯,只是一个空间。你的游戏空间中肯定会有物体。角色、道具、令牌、记分牌或游戏中可以看到或操纵的任何东西都属于这一类。对象是游戏机制的“名词”。从技术上讲,有时你可能会将空间本身视为一个对象,但通常你的游戏空间与其他对象有足够的不同,以至于它与众不同。对象通常具有一个或多个属性,其中之一通常是游戏空间中的当前位置。

A space without anything in it is, well, just a space. Your game space will surely have objects in it. Characters, props, tokens, scoreboards, or anything that can be seen or manipulated in your game falls into this category. Objects are the “nouns” of game mechanics. Technically, there are times you might consider the space itself an object, but usually the space of your game is different enough from other objects that it stands apart. Objects generally have one or more attributes, one of which is often the current position in the game space.

属性是有关对象的信息类别。例如,在赛车游戏中,汽车可能具有最大速度和当前速度属性。每个属性都有一个当前状态。“最大速度”属性的状态可能是 150 英里/小时,而“当前速度”属性的状态可能是 75 英里/小时(如果汽车行驶速度为 75 英里/小时)。最大速度的状态不会发生很大变化,除非您升级汽车的引擎。另一方面,当前速度会随着您的游戏不断变化。

Attributes are categories of information about an object. For example, in a racing game, a car might have maximum speed and current speed as attributes. Each attribute has a current state. The state of the “maximum speed” attribute might be 150 mph, while the state of the “current speed” attribute might be 75 mph if that is how fast the car is going. Maximum speed is not a state that will change much, unless perhaps you upgrade the engine in your car. Current speed, on the other hand, changes constantly as you play.

如果说对象是游戏机制的名词,那么属性及其状态就是形容词。

If objects are the nouns of game mechanics, attributes and their states are the adjectives.

属性可以是静态的(例如棋子的颜色),在整个游戏过程中永远不会改变,也可以是动态的(棋子具有“移动模式”属性,该属性有三种可能的状态:“正常”、“王”和“被捕获”)。我们主要对动态属性感兴趣。

Attributes can be static (such as the color of a checker), never changing throughout the game, or dynamic (the checker has a “movement mode” attribute with three possible states: “normal,” “king,” and “captured”). Primarily, we are interested in dynamic attributes.

以下还有两个例子:

Here are two more examples:

  1. 在国际象棋中,国王具有“移动模式”属性,其中包含三个重要状态(“自由移动”、“被将军”和“被将死”)。

  2. In chess, the king has a “movement mode” attribute with three important states (“free to move,” “in check,” and “checkmated.”)

  3. 在大富翁游戏中,棋盘上的每处房产都可以看作一个对象,该对象具有一个动态的“房屋数量”属性,有六种状态(0、1、2、3、4、酒店),以及一个“抵押”属性,有两种状态(是、否)。

  4. In Monopoly, each property on the board can be considered an object with a dynamic “number of houses” attribute with six states (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, hotel) and a “mortgaged” attribute with two states (yes, no).

向玩家传达每个状态变化是否重要?不一定。有些状态变化最好隐藏起来。但对于其他状态变化,确保它们被隐藏是至关重要的传达给玩家。一个好的经验法则是,如果两个物体的行为方式相同,它们的外观应该相同。如果它们的行为方式不同,它们的外观应该不同。

Is it important to communicate every state change to the player? Not necessarily. Some state changes are better hidden. But for others, it is crucial to be sure they are communicated to the player. A good rule of thumb is that if two objects behave the same way, they should look the same. If they behave differently, they should look different.

电子游戏对象(尤其是模拟智能角色的对象)具有如此多的属性和状态,设计师很容易感到困惑。为每个属性构建一个状态图通常很有用,以确保您了解哪些状态与哪些状态相连以及什么触发了状态更改。在游戏编程方面,将属性的状态实现为“状态机”是一种非常有用的方法,可以使所有这些复杂性保持整洁并易于调试。图 12.12是Pac-Man中幽灵的“运动”属性的示例状态图。

Videogame objects, especially ones that simulate intelligent characters, have so many attributes and states that it is easy for a designer to get confused. It is often useful to construct a state diagram for each attribute to make sure you understand which states are connected to which and what triggers state changes. In terms of game programming, implementing the state of an attribute as a “state machine” can be a very useful way to keep all this complexity tidy and easy to debug. Figure 12.12 is a sample state diagram for the “movement” attribute of the ghosts in Pac-Man.



12.12

FIGURE

12.12

写着“关在笼子里”的圆圈是幽灵的初始状态(通常使用双圆圈来表示起始状态)。每个箭头都表示可能的状态转换,以及触发该转换的事件。在尝试设计游戏中的复杂行为时,这样的图表非常有用。它们迫使您真正思考对象可能发生的所有事情以及导致这些事情发生的原因。通过在计算机代码中实现这些状态转换,您可以自动禁止非法转换(例如“关在笼子里”→“蓝色”),这有助于减少令人费解的错误。这些图表可能非常复杂,有时是嵌套的。例如,真正的吃豆人算法在“追逐吃豆人”中很可能实际上有几个子状态,例如“扫描吃豆人”、“跟在吃豆人的尾巴上”和“穿过隧道”。

The circle that reads “In Cage” is the initial state for the ghosts (double circle is often used to indicate the start state). Each of the arrows indicates a possible state transition, with an event that triggers that transition. Diagrams like these are very useful when trying to design complex behaviors in a game. They force you to really think through everything that can happen to an object and what makes it happen. By implementing these state transitions in computer code, you automatically forbid illegal transitions (such as “In Cage” → “Blue”), which helps cut down on puzzling bugs. These diagrams can get quite complicated and are sometimes nested. For example, it is quite likely that the real Pac-Man algorithm actually has several substates in “Chasing Pac-Man,” such as “Scanning for Pac-Man,” “On Pac-Man’s Tail,” and “Moving through a Tunnel.”

决定哪些对象具有哪些属性和哪些状态取决于您。通常有多种方法来表示同一事物。例如,在扑克游戏中,您可以将玩家的手牌定义为游戏空间中包含五张牌对象的区域,或者您可以决定不将牌视为对象,而只是将玩家的手牌称为具有五种不同牌属性的对象。与游戏设计中的所有事物一样,思考某件事的“正确”方式是当前最有用的方式。

Deciding which objects have what attributes and what states is up to you. There are often multiple ways to represent the same thing. In a game of poker, for example, you could define a player’s hand as an area of the game space that has five card objects in it, or you could decide you don’t want to think of cards as objects and just call the player’s hand an object that has five different card attributes. As with everything in game design, the “right” way to think about something is whichever way is most useful at the moment.

强迫玩家注意太多状态(太多游戏部件、太多每个角色的统计数据)的游戏可能会让人感到困惑和不知所措。在第 13 章平衡中,我们将讨论优化玩家必须处理的状态数量的技巧。将游戏严格视为一组具有不断变化的状态的对象和属性可以提供非常有用的视角,它充当了镜头 #28

Games that force the players to be aware of too many states (too many game pieces, too many statistics about each character) to play can confuse and overwhelm. In Chapter 13: Balance, we’ll discuss techniques for optimizing the amount of state the players have to deal with. Thinking of your game strictly as a set of objects and attributes with changing states can give a very useful perspective, and it serves as Lens #28.

秘密

Secrets

关于游戏属性及其状态的一个非常重要的决定是谁知道哪些属性。在许多棋盘游戏中,所有信息都是公开的;也就是说,每个人都知道。在国际象棋游戏中,双方都可以看到棋盘上的每个棋子和每个被吃掉的棋子——除了对方在想什么,没有秘密。在纸牌游戏中,隐藏或私人状态是游戏的重要组成部分。你知道自己拿着什么牌,但对手拿着什么牌,这对你来说是一个谜。例如,扑克游戏主要是试图猜测对手有什么牌,同时试图隐藏你可能有什么牌的信息。当你改变哪些信息是公开的或私人的,游戏就会发生巨大的变化。在标准的“抽牌扑克”中,所有状态都是私人的——玩家只能根据你下注的金额来猜测你的手牌。在“梭哈扑克”中,你的一些牌是私人的,一些是公开的。这让对手对方的状况信息越多,游戏的感觉就越不同。诸如BattleshipStratego之类的棋盘游戏都是关于猜测对手私人属性的状态。

A very important decision about game attributes and their states is who is aware of which ones. In many board games, all information is public; that is, everyone knows it. In a game of chess, both players can see every piece on the board and every piece that has been captured—there are no secrets, except what the other player is thinking. In card games, hidden or private state is a big part of the game. You know what cards you hold, but which ones your opponents hold is a mystery for you to puzzle out. The game of poker, for example, is largely about trying to guess what cards your opponents have while attempting to conceal information about what cards you might have. Games become dramatically different when you change what information is public or private. In standard “draw poker,” all states are private—players can only guess your hand based on how much you bet. In “stud poker,” some of your cards are private and some are public. This gives opponents much more information about each other’s situations, and the game feels very different. Board games such as Battleship and Stratego are all about guessing the states of your opponent’s private attributes.

在电子游戏中,我们面临着新的东西:只有游戏本身知道的状态。这就引发了一个问题,从游戏机制的角度来看,虚拟对手应该被视为玩家还是游戏的一部分。 有一个故事很好地说明了这一点:1980 年,我祖父买了一台 Intellivision 游戏机,附带一个“拉斯维加斯扑克和二十一点”游戏卡带。他玩得很开心,但我祖母拒绝玩。“它作弊,”她坚持说。我说这很愚蠢——它只是一台电脑——它怎么能作弊?她解释了她的理由:“它知道我所有的牌,以及牌堆里的所有牌!它怎么可能不作弊?”我不得不承认,我的解释是计算机在做出游戏决策时“不会看这些”听起来有点站不住脚。但它指出了游戏中实际上有三个实体知道不同属性的状态:我祖父,他知道自己手牌的状态;虚拟对手算法,它“知道”自己手牌的状态;最后是游戏的主算法,它知道两个玩家的手牌、牌堆里的每一张牌以及有关游戏的其他一切。

In videogames, we face something new: a state that only the game itself knows about. This raises a question about whether virtual opponents, from a game mechanics standpoint, should be thought of as players or just part of the game. This is well illustrated by a story: In 1980, my grandfather bought an Intellivision game console, which came with a “Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack” game cartridge. He had great fun with it, but my grandmother refused to play. “It cheats,” she insisted. I told her that was silly—it was just a computer—how could it cheat? She explained her reasoning: “It knows what all my cards are, and all the cards in the deck! How can it not cheat?” And I had to admit that my explanation that the computer “doesn’t look at those” when it is making decisions about playing the game sounded kind of weak. But it brings out the point that there were really three entities in that game who knew the states of different attributes: my grandfather, who was aware of the state of his hand; the virtual opponent algorithm, which was “aware” of the state of its hand; and lastly the main algorithm for the game, which was aware of both players’ hands, every card in the deck, and everything else about the game.

因此,从公共/私人属性的角度来看,将虚拟对手视为与玩家同等的个体实体似乎是合理的。然而,游戏本身是另一个具有特殊地位的实体,因为它实际上并没有在玩游戏,尽管它可能正在做出使游戏得以进行的决策。西莉亚·皮尔斯指出了另一种信息,它对我们迄今为止提到的所有实体而言都是私密的:随机生成的信息,例如掷骰子。根据您对宿命论的看法,您可能会认为这些信息在生成和披露之前根本不存在,因此将其称为私密信息有点愚蠢。但它确实很适合我称之为“知者层次”的维恩图,这有助于形象化公共和私人状态之间的关系:

So, it seems that from a public/private attribute point of view, it makes sense to consider virtual opponents as individual entities on par with players. The game itself, though, is yet another entity, with a special status, since it isn’t really playing the game, although it may be making decisions that enable the game to happen. Celia Pearce points out another kind of information, which is private from all of the entities we have mentioned so far: randomly generated information, such as a die roll. Depending on your views about predestination, you might argue that this information doesn’t even exist until it is generated and revealed, so that referring to it as private is a little silly. But it does fit well into a Venn diagram I call the “hierarchy of knowers,” which helps to visualize the relationship between the public and private states:



12.13

FIGURE

12.13

图 12.13中的每个圆圈代表一个“知者”。“知者”分别是上帝、游戏和玩家 1、2 和 3。每个点代表游戏中的一些信息 — 属性的状态:

Each circle in Figure 12.13 represents a “knower.” The “knowers” are god, the game, and players 1, 2, and 3. Each point represents some information in the game—the state of an attribute:

  • A是完全公开的信息,例如游戏板上的位置棋子,或一张面朝上的牌。所有玩家都知道它。

  • A is information that is completely public, such as the position playing piece on a game board, or a face-up card. All the players are aware of it.

  • B是玩家 2 和 3 共享但对玩家 1 保密的状态。也许 2 和 3 都有机会看一张面朝下的牌,但玩家 1 没有。或者也许玩家 2 和 3 是玩家 1 的虚拟对手,他们的算法让他们共享信息,以便他们可以组队对抗玩家 1。

  • B is the state that is shared between players 2 and 3 but kept secret from player 1. Perhaps 2 and 3 each had the opportunity to look at a face-down card, but player 1 didn’t. Or maybe players 2 and 3 are virtual opponents of player 1, and their algorithm has them sharing information so they can team up against player 1.

  • C是单个玩家(在本例中为玩家 2)的私人信息。例如,可能是他发到的牌。

  • C is information private to a single player, in this case player 2. It could be cards he was dealt, for example.

  • D是游戏知道但玩家不知道的信息。有些机械棋盘游戏的物理结构中存在这种状态,但玩家不知道。《活着》就是一个典型的例子,塑料滑块移动时会露出棋盘上的洞。Touché是另一个有趣的例子,棋盘的每个方格下都放置了极性未知的磁铁。游戏“知道”这些状态,但玩家不知道。另一个例子是桌面角色扮演游戏其中有一个“地下城主”或“游戏大师”,她不是玩家之一,私下知道很多游戏状态,因为她可以说是游戏的运行机制。大多数电脑游戏都有很多玩家不知道的内部状态。

  • D is information that the game knows about, but not the players themselves. There are some mechanical board games where this kind of state exists in the physical structure of the board game, but is unknown to the players. Stay Alive was a classic example, with plastic sliders that when moved revealed holes in the board. Touché is another interesting example, where magnets of unknown polarity are placed under each square of the board. The states are “known” by the game, but not by the players. Another example is tabletop role-playing games, which feature a “dungeon master,” or “game master,” who is not one of the players and who privately knows a great deal of the game state, since she is the operational mechanism of the game, so to speak. Most computer games have a great deal of internal state that is not known to the players.

  • E是随机生成的信息,只有命运、上帝等才知道。

  • E is randomly generated information, known only by the fates, god, etc.

秘密就是力量。镜头 #29将帮助您引导这种力量,让您的游戏尽可能有趣。拿去吧,但不要告诉任何人。

Secrets are power. Lens #29 will help you channel that power to make your game as interesting as it can be. Take it, but don’t tell anyone.

机制 4:行动

Mechanic 4: Actions

下一个重要的游戏机制是动作。动作是游戏机制的“动词”。对动作有两种看法,或者换句话说,回答“玩家能做什么?”这个问题有两种方式。

The next important game mechanic is the action. Actions are the “verbs” of game mechanics. There are two perspectives on actions or, put another way, two ways to answer the question “What can the players do?”

第一种动作是基本动作。这些只是玩家可以采取的基本动作。例如,在跳棋中,玩家只能执行三种基本操作:

The first kind of action is the basic action. These are simply the base actions a player can take. For example, in checkers, a player can perform only three basic operations:

  • 向前移动一个棋子。

  • Move a checker forward.

  • 跳过对手的棋子。

  • Jump an opponent’s checker.

  • 将棋子向后移动(仅限国王)。

  • Move a checker backwards (kings only).

第二种行动是战略行动。这些行动只在游戏的大局中有意义——它们与玩家如何使用基本行动来实现目标有关。战略行动的列表通常比基本行动的列表长。考虑一下跳棋中的一些可能的战略行动:

The second kind of action is strategic action. These are actions that are only meaningful in the larger picture of the game—they have to do with how the player is using basic actions to achieve a goal. The list of strategic actions is generally longer than the list of basic actions. Consider some possible strategic actions in checkers:

  • 通过将另一个棋子移到其后面来保护棋子不被捕获。

  • Protect a checker from being captured by moving another checker behind it.

  • 迫使对手做出不必要的跳跃。

  • Force an opponent into making an unwanted jump.

  • 牺牲一个棋子来欺骗你的对手。

  • Sacrifice a checker to trick your opponent.

  • 搭建一座“桥梁”来保护你的后排。

  • Build a “bridge” to protect your back row.

  • 将棋子移至“王行”以使其成为王。

  • Move a checker into the “king row” to make it a king.

新兴游戏玩法

Emergent Gameplay

战略行动通常涉及游戏中的微妙互动,而且往往是非常具有战略性的举动。这些行动本身通常不是规则的一部分,而是在玩游戏时自然出现的动作和策略。大多数游戏设计师都认为,有趣的突发行动是好游戏的标志。因此,有意义的战略行动与基本行动的比例是衡量游戏具有多少突发行为的一个很好的指标。一款允许玩家进行少量基本行动但进行大量战略行动的游戏确实很优雅。应该注意的是,这是一个有点主观的衡量标准,因为“有意义的”战略行动的数量是一个见仁见智的问题。

The strategic actions often involve subtle interactions within the game and are often very strategic moves. These actions are mostly not part of the rules, per se, but rather actions and strategies that emerge naturally as the game is played. Most game designers agree that interesting emergent actions are the hallmark of a good game. Consequently, the ratio of meaningful strategic actions to basic actions is a good measure of how much emergent behavior your game features. It is an elegant game indeed that allows a player a small number of basic actions but a large number of strategic actions. It should be noted that this is a somewhat subjective measure, since the number of “meaningful” strategic actions is a matter of opinion.

尝试创造“突发玩法”,即有趣的战略行动,就像照料花园一样,因为突发玩法有自己的生命,但同时又很脆弱,很容易被摧毁。当你注意到游戏中出现了一些有趣的战略行动时,你必须能够识别它们,然后尽你所能培育它们,让它们有机会蓬勃发展。但是什么让这些东西首先涌现出来呢?这不仅仅是运气——你可以做一些事情来增加有趣的战略行动出现的机会。以下是准备游戏土壤和播下突发种子的五个技巧。

Trying to create “emergent gameplay,” that is, interesting strategic actions, has been likened to tending a garden, since what emerges has a life of its own, but at the same time, it is fragile and easily destroyed. When you notice some interesting strategic actions showing up in your game, you must be able to recognize them and then do what you can to nurture them and give them a chance to flourish. But what makes these things spring up in the first place? It is not just luck—there are things you can do to increase the chances of interesting strategic actions appearing. Here are five tips for preparing the soil of your game and planting seeds of emergence.

  1. 添加更多动词:即添加更多基本动作。当基本动作彼此之间、与对象之间以及与游戏空间之间交互时,就会出现战略动作。添加更多基本动作时,就会有更多的交互机会,从而产生更多突发事件。一款可以奔跑、跳跃、射击、购买、出售、驾驶和建造的游戏比一款只能奔跑和跳跃的游戏具有更大的突发事件潜力。但要小心——添加太多基本动作,尤其是那些不能很好地相互交互的动作,会导致游戏臃肿、混乱和不雅。请记住,战略动作与基本动作的比例比基本动作的绝对数量更重要。通常,添加一个好的基本动作比添加一堆平庸的动作要好。

  2. Add more verbs: That is, add more basic actions. The strategic actions appear when basic actions interact with each other, with objects, and with the game space. When you add more basic actions, there are more opportunities for interaction and thus emergence. A game where you can run, jump, shoot, buy, sell, drive, and build is going to have a lot more potential for emergence than a game where you can just run and jump. Be careful, though—adding too many basic actions, especially ones that don’t interact with each other well, can lead to a game that is bloated, confusing, and inelegant. Keep in mind that the ratio of strategic actions to basic actions is more important than the sheer number of basic actions. It is usually better to add one good basic action than a slew of mediocre ones.

  3. 可以作用于许多对象的动词:这可能是制作一款优雅、有趣的游戏所能做到的最强大的一件事。如果你给玩家一把只能射击坏人的枪,那么你的游戏就非常简单了。但如果同一把枪还可以用来打掉门锁、打破窗户、寻找食物、爆掉汽车轮胎或在墙上写信息,那么你现在就开始进入一个充满各种可能性的世界。你仍然只有一个基本动作:“射击”,但通过增加你可以有效射击的东西的数量,有意义的战略行动的数量也会增加。

  4. Verbs that can act on many objects: This is possibly the single most powerful thing you can do to make an elegant, interesting game. If you give a player a gun that can only shoot bad guys, you have a very simple game. But if that same gun can also be used to shoot a lock off a door, break a window, hunt for food, pop a car tire, or write messages on the wall, you now start to enter a world of many possibilities. You still only have one basic action: “shoot,” but by increasing the number of things you can usefully shoot at, the number of meaningful strategic actions increases as well.

  5. 可以通过多种方式实现的目标:让玩家在游戏中做各种不同的事情,给他们很多动词,动词游戏中有很多物体。但如果目标只能以一种方式实现,玩家就没有理由去寻找不寻常的互动和有趣的策略。继续“射击”的例子,如果你让玩家射击各种各样的东西,但游戏的目标只是“射击怪物首领”,玩家只会这么做。另一方面,如果你可以射击怪物,或者射出支撑链让吊灯砸到怪物身上,或者甚至根本不射击怪物,而是通过一些非暴力手段阻止怪物,那么你将拥有丰富、动态的游戏玩法,其中很多事情都是可能的。这种方法的挑战在于游戏变得难以平衡,因为如果其中一个选项总是比其他选项容易得多(占优策略),玩家就会一直追求那个选项。我们将在第 13 章平衡中进一步讨论这个问题。

  6. Goals that can be achieved more than one way: It’s great to let players do all kinds of different things in your game, giving them lots of verbs, and verbs with lots of objects. But if the goals can only be achieved one way, players have no reason to look for unusual interactions and interesting strategies. To follow up with the “shoot” example, if you let players shoot all kinds of things, but the goal of your game is just “shoot the boss monster,” the players will only do that. On the other hand, if you can shoot the monster, or shoot out a support chain so a chandelier could crash down on her, or maybe even not shoot her at all, but stop her through some nonviolent means, you will have rich, dynamic gameplay, where lots of things are possible. The challenge with this approach is that the game becomes hard to balance, for if one of the options is always significantly easier than the others (a dominant strategy), players will always pursue that option. We will discuss that further in Chapter 13: Balance.

  7. 很多主题:如果跳棋只涉及一个红色跳棋和一个黑色跳棋,但规则相同,那么游戏就一点也不有趣。正是因为玩家可以移动许多不同的棋子,棋子可以相互作用、协调和牺牲,游戏才变得有趣。这种方法显然不适用于所有游戏,但它可以在一些令人惊讶的地方发挥作用。战略行动的数量似乎大致等于主语乘以动词乘以宾语的数量,因此增加更多主语很可能会增加战略行动的数量。

  8. Many subjects: If checkers involved just one red checker and one black one but had the same rules, the game would not be interesting at all. It is because the players have many different pieces they can move, pieces that can interact with one another, coordinating and sacrificing, that the game becomes interesting. This method obviously doesn’t work for all games, but it can work in some surprising places. The number of strategic actions seems to have roughly a magnitude of subjects times verbs times objects, so adding more subjects is very likely to increase the number of strategic actions.

  9. 改变约束的副作用:如果每次你采取一个行动,都会产生改变你或对手约束的副作用,那么很可能会产生非常有趣的游戏玩法。让我们再看看跳棋。每次移动一个棋子时,你不仅会改变威胁吃掉的格子,还会同时改变对手(和你)可以移动到的格子。从某种意义上说,无论你是否有意为之,每次移动都会改变游戏空间的本质。想想看,如果多个棋子可以和平共处在一个格子上,跳棋会有多大的不同。通过强制游戏的多个方面随着每个基本动作而改变,你很可能会突然出现有趣的战略行动。

  10. Side effects that change constraints: If every time you take an action, it has side effects that change the constraints on you or your opponent, very interesting gameplay is likely to result. Let us again look to checkers. Every time you move a piece, you not only change the squares that you threaten with capture, but you simultaneously change which squares your opponent (and you) can move into. In a sense, every move changes the very nature of the game space, whether or not you intended it to. Think how different checkers would be if multiple pieces could peacefully cohabitate on a single square. By forcing multiple aspects of the game to change with every basic action, you are very likely to cause interesting strategic actions to suddenly appear.

当将游戏与书籍和电影进行比较时,最显著的差异之一就是动词的数量。游戏通常会将玩家的潜在动作限制在非常狭窄的范围内,而在故事中,角色可以采取的可能动作数量似乎几乎是无限的。这是游戏的一个自然副作用,因为在游戏中,动作及其所有效果都必须即时模拟,而在故事中,这一切都是提前安排好的。在第 18 章间接控制中,我们将讨论如何在玩家的脑海中弥合这种“动作差距”,这样你就可以给人无限可能的感觉,同时将基本动作的数量保持在可控的限度内。

When comparing games with books and films, one of the most striking differences is the number of verbs. Games usually limit players to a very narrow range of potential actions, while in stories the number of possible actions that characters can engage in seems nearly limitless. This is a natural side effect of the fact that in games, the actions and all their effects must be simulated on the fly, while in stories it is all worked out ahead of time. In Chapter 18: Indirect Control, we will discuss how this “action gap” can be bridged in the mind of the player, so that you can give the feeling of limitless possibilities while keeping the number of basic actions at a manageable limit.

很多游戏看起来都差不多,是因为它们使用了相同的动作。看看那些被认为是“衍生”的游戏,你会发现它们的动作和老游戏是一样的。看看那些被人们称为“创新”的游戏,你会发现它们为玩家提供了新的动作,无论是基本动作还是战略动作。当《大金刚》首次出现时,它看起来非常不同,因为它是关于跑步和跳跃的,这在当时是新事物。《牧场物语》是一款关于农业的游戏。《块魂》是关于滚动粘球的游戏。玩家可以采取的动作对于定义游戏机制至关重要,以至于改变一个动作就可以让你获得完全不同的游戏。

The reason so many games seem similar to one another is because they use the same set of actions. Look at the games that are considered “derivative,” and you will see that they have the same set of actions as older games. Look at games that people call “innovative,” and you will find that they give the players new kinds of actions, either basic or strategic. When Donkey Kong first appeared, it seemed very different because it was about running and jumping, which was new at the time. Harvest Moon was a game about farming. Katamari Damacy was about rolling a sticky ball. The actions a player can take are so crucial to defining a game’s mechanics that changing a single action can give you a completely different game.

一些设计师梦想着在游戏中玩家能想到的任何动词都可以成为一种可能的动作,这是一个美丽的梦想。一些大型多人游戏开始朝这个方向发展,为战斗、制作和社交互动提供了各种各样的动词。在某种程度上,这是对过去的回归——在 20 世纪 70 年代和 80 年代,文字冒险游戏非常流行,通常有几十到几百个可能的动词。只有随着更多视觉游戏的兴起,动词的数量才突然减少,因为在基于视觉的游戏中支持所有这些动作是不可行的。文字冒险游戏类型的消亡(或休眠?)通常归因于公众对精美视觉效果的渴望——但从动作的角度来看,也许还有另一种解释。现代 3D 电子游戏提供了玩家只能执行非常有限的基本动作。玩家通常知道他们可能尝试的所有动作。在文字冒险游戏中,完整的基本动作集并不明确,发现它们是游戏的一部分。很多时候,解决棘手谜题的方法就是想输入一个不常见的动词,比如“旋转鱼”或“挠猴子痒痒”。虽然这一切都很有创意,但也常常令人沮丧——游戏支持的数百个动词中,有数千个动词不支持。因此,玩家并没有真正拥有文字冒险界面假装给予他们的“完全自由”。这种沮丧感可能是文字冒险游戏失宠的主要原因。

Some designers dream of games where any verb the player can think of is a possible action, and this is a beautiful dream. Some massively multiplayer games are starting to move in that direction, offering a wide range of verbs for combat, crafting, and social interaction. In a way, this is a return to the past—in the 1970s and 1980s, text adventures were very popular typically featuring dozens or hundreds of possible verbs. Only with the rise of more visual games did the number of verbs suddenly decrease, because it was not feasible to support all those actions in a visual-based game. The demise (or hibernation?) of the text adventure genre is usually attributed to the public’s hunger for fancy visuals—but perhaps, from an action perspective, there is another explanation. Modern 3D videogames give you a very limited range of basic actions. The player generally knows every action they can possibly attempt. In text adventures, the complete set of basic actions was unclear, and discovering them was part of the game. Very often, the solution to a tricky puzzle was thinking to type an unusual verb, like “spin the fish” or “tickle the monkey.” While this was all very creative, it was also often frustrating—for every one of the hundreds of verbs a game supported, there were thousands it did not. As a result, players did not really have the “complete freedom” that text adventure interfaces pretended to give them. It is possible that this frustration, more than anything else, caused text adventures to fall from favor.

您的行动选择在很大程度上决定了您的游戏结构,因此让我们将其设为镜头#31

Your choice of actions significantly defines your game structure, so let’s make that Lens #31.

机制 5:规则

Mechanic 5: Rules

规则实际上是最基本的机制。它们定义了空间、时间、物体、动作、动作的后果、动作的限制以及目标。换句话说,它们使我们迄今为止看到的所有机制成为可能,并增加了使游戏成为游戏的关键因素——目标

The rules are really the most fundamental mechanic. They define the space, the timing, the objects, the actions, the consequences of the actions, the constraints on the actions, and the goals. In other words, they make possible all the mechanics we have seen so far and add the crucial thing that makes a game a game—goals.

Parlett 规则分析

Parlett’s Rule Analysis

游戏历史学家 David Parlett 非常出色地分析了与游戏玩法相关的不同类型的规则,如下图所示。

David Parlett, game historian, did a very good job of analyzing the different kinds of rules that are involved with gameplay, as shown in this diagram.



12.14

FIGURE

12.14

这显示了我们可能遇到的所有类型的规则之间的关系,因此让我们逐一考虑一下。

This shows the relationships between all the kinds of rules we are likely to encounter, so let’s consider each.

  1. 操作规则:这些是最容易理解的。这些基本上就是“玩家玩游戏时要做的事情”。当玩家理解操作规则时,他们就可以玩游戏了。

  2. Operational rules: These are the easiest to understand. These are basically “What the players do to play the game.” When players understand the operational rules, they can play a game.

  3. 基础规则:基础规则是游戏的基本形式结构。操作规则可能会说“玩家应该掷一个六面骰子,并收集那么多的力量筹码。”基础规则会更抽象:“玩家的力量值会随机增加一个从 1 到 6 的数字。”基础规则是游戏状态及其变化方式和时间的数学表示。棋盘、骰子、筹码、健康计量表等都只是跟踪基础游戏状态的操作方式。正如 Parlett 的图表所示,基础规则为操作规则提供信息。目前还没有任何标准的符号来表示这些规则,而且对于是否有可能形成完整的符号也存在一些疑问。在现实生活中,游戏设计师会根据需要学习基础规则,但他们很少需要以完全抽象的方式正式记录整套基础规则。

  4. Foundational rules: The foundational rules are the underlying formal structure of the game. The operational rules might say “The player should roll a six-sided die, and collect that many power chips.” The foundational rules would be more abstract: “The player’s power value is increased by a random number from 1 to 6.” Foundational rules are a mathematical representation of game state and how and when it changes. Boards, dice, chips, health meters, etc., are all just operational ways of keeping track of the foundational game state. As Parlett’s diagram shows, foundational rules inform operational rules. There is not yet any standard notation for representing these rules, and there is some question about whether a complete notation is even possible. In real life, game designers learn to see the foundational rules on an as-needed basis, but seldom do they have any need to formally document the entire set of foundational rules in a completely abstract way.

  5. 行为规则:这些规则是游戏玩法中隐含的,大多数人自然而然地将其理解为“良好体育精神”的一部分。例如,在下棋时,一方不应在另一方思考时挠对方的痒痒,也不应花五个小时来走一步。这些规则很少明确说明——大多数情况下,每个人都知道它们。它们存在的事实强调了游戏是玩家之间的一种社会契约。这些规则也为操作规则提供了依据。史蒂文·斯奈德曼 (Steven Sniderman) 写过一篇关于行为规则的优秀文章,名为“不成文的规则”。

  6. Behavioral rules: These are rules that are implicit to gameplay, which most people naturally understand as part of “good sportsmanship.” For example, during a game of chess, one should not tickle the other player while they are trying to think or take five hours to make a move. These are seldom stated explicitly—mostly, everyone knows them. The fact that they exist underlines the point that a game is a kind of social contract between players. These, too, inform the operational rules. Steven Sniderman has written an excellent essay about behavioral rules called “Unwritten Rules.”

  7. 书面规则:这些是“游戏附带的规则”,玩家必须阅读才能了解操作规则。当然,实际上只有少数人会阅读这份文件——大多数人都是通过别人解释如何玩游戏来学习游戏的。为什么?将如何玩游戏的非线性复杂性编码到文档中非常困难,同样,解码这样的文档也很难。现代电子游戏已逐渐废除书面规则,转而通过游戏本身通过交互式教程教玩家如何玩游戏。这种动手实践的方法更为有效,尽管设计和实施起来可能具有挑战性且耗时,因为它涉及许多迭代,而这些迭代在游戏处于最终状态之前无法完成。每个游戏设计师都必须准备好回答这个问题:“玩家将如何学习玩我的游戏?”因为如果有人无法弄清楚你的游戏,他们就不会玩它。

  8. Written rules: These are the “rules that come with the game,” the document that players have to read to gain an understanding of the operational rules. Of course, in reality, only a small number of people read this document—most people learn a game by having someone else explain how to play. Why? It is very hard to encode the nonlinear intricacies of how to play a game into a document and similarly hard to decode such a document. Modern videogames have gradually been doing away with written rules in favor of having the game itself teach players how to play through interactive tutorials. This hands-on approach is far more effective, though it can be challenging and time consuming to design and implement as it involves many iterations that cannot be completed until the game is in its final state. Every game designer must have a ready answer to the question: “How will players learn to play my game?” Because if someone can’t figure out your game, they will not play it.

  9. 规则:只有在严肃、竞争性的环境中进行游戏时,才会制定规则,因为游戏的风险很高,需要明确记录良好的体育精神规则,或者需要澄清或修改官方书面规则。这些规则通常被称为“锦标赛规则”,因为在严肃的锦标赛期间最需要这种官方澄清。请考虑在 2005 年 Penny Arcade Expo 上玩《铁拳 5》(一款格斗游戏)时的锦标赛规则:

    1. 单淘汰制。

    2. 您可以携带自己的控制器。

    3. 标准 VS 模式。

    4. 100%健康。

    5. 随机阶段选择。

    6. 60 秒计时器。

    7. 5 轮中取 3 胜。

    8. 3 局 2 胜。

    9. 木人被禁止。

    其中大部分只是明确说明锦标赛中将使用哪些游戏设置。“你可以带上自己的控制器”是一个关于什么是“公平竞争”的正式决定。这里最有趣的规则是“禁止使用 Mokujin”。Mokujin 是你可以在《铁拳 5》中选择扮演的角色之一。玩家们普遍的感觉是,Mokujin 的“眩晕”动作非常强大,任何选择扮演 Mokujin 的玩家都有可能赢得比赛,让锦标赛变得毫无意义。所以这条“规则”是为了改进游戏,确保锦标赛平衡、公平、有趣。

  10. Laws: These are only formed when games are played in serious, competitive settings, where the stakes are high enough that a need is felt to explicitly record the rules of good sportsmanship or where there is need to clarify or modify the official written rules. These are often called “tournament rules,” since during a serious tournament is when there is the most need for this kind of official clarification. Consider these tournament rules for playing Tekken 5 (a fighting game) at the 2005 Penny Arcade Expo:

    1. Single elimination.

    2. You may bring your own controller.

    3. Standard VS mode.

    4. 100% health.

    5. Random stage select.

    6. 60 second timer.

    7. Best 3 of 5 rounds.

    8. Best 2 of 3 games.

    9. Mokujin is banned.

    Most of these are just clarifying exactly which game settings will be used in the tournament. “You may bring your own controller” is a formalized decision about what is “fair play.” The most interesting rule here is “Mokujin is banned.” Mokujin is one of the characters you can choose to play in Tekken 5. The general feeling among players is that Mokujin’s “stun” move is so powerful that any player who chooses to play Mokujin is likely to win the game, making a tournament pointless. So this “law” is an attempt to improve the game, ensuring the tournament is balanced, fair, and fun.

  11. 官方规则:当游戏玩得足够严肃,以至于一群玩家觉得有必要将书面规则与法律合并时,就会制定官方规则。随着时间的推移,这些官方规则后来成为书面规则。在国际象棋中,当一名玩家的举动使对手的国王面临被将死的危险时,该玩家有义务通过说“将军”来警告对手。曾经,这是一条“法律”,而不是书面规则,但现在它已成为“官方规则”的一部分。

  12. Official rules: These are created when a game is played seriously enough that a group of players feels a need to merge the written rules with the laws. Over time, these official rules later become the written rules. In chess, when a player makes a move that puts the opponent’s king in danger of checkmate, that player is obligated to warn the opponent by saying “check.” At one time, this was a “law,” not a written rule, but now it is part of the “official rules.”

  13. 建议规则:通常被称为“策略规则”,这些只是帮助您更好地玩游戏的提示,从游戏机制的角度来看,根本不是真正的“规则”。

  14. Advisory rules: Often called “rules of strategy,” these are just tips to help you play better, and not really “rules” at all from a game mechanics standpoint.

  15. 内部规则:Parlett 并未明确描述这些规则,但他确实指出,玩家在玩游戏时可能会发现他们想要调整操作规则,以使游戏更有趣。这是他图表上的“反馈”,因为内部规则通常是玩家在玩了几轮游戏后发现的不足之处后制定的。

  16. House rules: These rules are not explicitly described by Parlett, but he does point out that as players play a game, they may find they want to tune the operational rules to make the game more fun. This is the “feedback” on his diagram, since house rules are usually created by players in response to a deficiency perceived after a few rounds of play.

模式

Modes

许多游戏在游戏的不同阶段都有非常不同的规则。规则通常会因模式不同而完全不同,几乎就像完全独立的游戏一样。一个令人难忘的例子是赛车游戏Pitstop。大多数时候,它是一款典型的赛车游戏,但有一个变化——如果你不定期停下来换轮胎,轮胎就会爆裂。当你停下来时,游戏就完全改变了——现在你不是在赛车,而是在赛车换轮胎,游戏界面也完全不同。当你的游戏以如此戏剧性的方式改变模式时,让玩家知道你处于哪种模式是非常重要的。模式太多,玩家会感到困惑。通常,有一个主模式,有几种子模式,这是一种组织不同模式的很好的分层方式。游戏设计师 Sid Meier 提出了一个很好的经验法则:玩家不应该在子游戏中花费太多时间,以至于忘记他们在主游戏中所做的事情。我们将在第15 章界面中进一步讨论模式。

Many games have very different rules during different parts of play. The rules often change completely from mode to mode, almost like completely separate games. One memorable instance was the racing game Pitstop. Most of the time, it was a typical racing game but with a twist—if you didn’t pull over to change your tires periodically, they would burst. When you did pull over, the game changed completely—now you were not racing your car, but rather racing to change your tires, with a completely different game interface. When your game changes modes in a dramatic way like this, it is very important that you let your players know which mode you are in. Too many modes and the players can get confused. Very often, there is one main mode, with several submodes, which is a good hierarchical way to organize the different modes. Game designer Sid Meier proposes an excellent rule of thumb: players should never spend so much time in a subgame that they forget what they were doing in the main game. We will talk more about modes in Chapter 15: Interface.

执行者

Enforcer

电子游戏与传统游戏之间最显著的区别之一在于谁来执行规则。在传统游戏中,规则主要由玩家自己执行,或者由高风险游戏(如体育赛事)中的公正裁判执行。在电脑游戏中,电脑可以(有时是必要的)执行规则。这不仅仅是一种便利——它允许创建比传统游戏复杂得多的游戏,因为现在玩家不必记住所有关于什么是可能的和是不可能的规则——他们只需在游戏中尝试,看看什么可行,什么不可行——他们不必记住所有规则或查找所有规则。从某种意义上说,过去的“规则”现在成为游戏世界的物理约束。如果不允许棋子以某种方式移动,它就不会以那种方式移动。许多游戏规则都是通过空间、物体和动作的设计来执行的。像《魔兽争霸》这样的游戏可以想象成一款棋盘游戏,但需要记住和遵循的规则太多了,很快就会成为一种乏味的体验。通过将执行规则的枯燥工作转移到计算机上,游戏可以达到其他方式无法达到的复杂性、微妙性和丰富性。但要谨慎行事——如果你的电子游戏规则太复杂,玩家甚至无法大致了解游戏的运作方式,他们就会不知所措和困惑。你必须让玩家能够自然地发现和理解复杂电子游戏的规则——而不是他们必须记住的东西。

One of the most significant differences between videogames and more traditional games is who enforces the rules. In traditional games, rules are primarily enforced by the players themselves or by an impartial referee in high-stakes games, such as sporting events. With computer games, it becomes possible (and sometimes necessary) for the computer to enforce the rules. This is more than a convenience—it allows for the creation of games much more complex than was traditionally possible, because now the players don’t have to memorize all the rules about what is and is not possible—they just try things in the game, and see what works and what doesn’t work—they don’t have to memorize it all, or look it up. In a sense, what used to be a “rule” now becomes a physical constraint of the game world. If a piece isn’t allowed to move a certain way, it simply doesn’t move that way. Many of the game rules are enforced by the design of the space, the objects, and the actions. A game like Warcraft could conceivably be a board game, but there would be so many rules to remember and state to keep track of that it would quickly become a dreary experience. By offloading the dull work of rules enforcement onto the computer, games can reach depths of complexity, subtlety, and richness that are not possible any other way. But proceed with caution—if the rules of your videogame are so complex that a player can’t even form a rough idea of how the game works, they will be overwhelmed and confused. You must make the rules of a complex videogame something that players can discover and understand naturally—not something they have to memorize.

欺骗性

Cheatability

游戏需要执行者的原因是为了防止作弊。违反规则当然是糟糕的游戏行为,但正如我们在历史上所看到的那样,一些玩家会不择手段地成为赢家。显然,当你玩游戏时,你会想确保其他人不会作弊。但作弊的后果比这更为阴险——如果玩家开始相信你的游戏是可以作弊的,即使它不是,你努力开发的所有宝贵的内生价值都会消失。玩家想象自己努力工作以赢得胜利,并想象另一个玩家作弊,这会让他们觉得自己像个傻瓜。这就是作弊的危险——如果玩家觉得你的游戏可以被作弊,有些人会试图作弊,但大多数人只是不想再玩了。

The reason games need an enforcer is to prevent cheating. Violating the rules is bad gamesmanship, certainly, but as we’ve seen throughout history, some players will stop at nothing to be perceived as the winner. Obviously, when you play a game, you want to make sure others don’t cheat. But cheating has a more insidious effect than that—if players start believing your game is cheatable, even if it isn’t, all the precious endogenous value you have worked to develop just slips away. Players imagine themselves working hard to win and imagine another player cheating, and it makes them feel like chumps. That is the danger of cheatability—if players feel like your game can be cheated, some will try to cheat, but most will just no longer want to play.

最重要的规则

The Most Important Rule

游戏有很多规则——如何移动以及你能做什么和不能做什么——但有一条规则是所有其他规则的基础:游戏的目标。游戏是关于实现目标的——你必须能够陈述你的游戏目标,并清楚地陈述它。通常,游戏中不只有一个目标,而是一系列目标——你需要陈述每个目标以及它们之间的关系。一个笨拙的陈述你的目标游戏的目标一开始就可能让玩家感到厌烦——如果他们不完全理解自己行动的目的,他们就无法确定地继续下去。国际象棋新手经常会因为有人笨拙地试图解释游戏目标而感到困惑:“你的目标是将对方的王将死……这意味着你要移动你的棋子,这样他就不会在不被将死的情况下移动……嗯,这意味着你的一个棋子可能会抓住他,只是,嗯,抓住王是违反规则的。”小时候,我经常想知道为什么一个被认为如此优雅的游戏会有如此不优雅的目标。我玩了好几年才意识到国际象棋的目标其实很简单:“抓住对手的王。”所有关于将死和将死的废话只是为了礼貌地警告你的对手他们即将面临危险。当你告诉潜在的国际象棋玩家这个简单的四个字的目标时,他们会变得多么感兴趣,这真是令人惊讶。对于您创建的任何游戏来说都是如此——玩家越容易理解目标,他们就越容易想象实现目标,并且他们就越有可能想要玩您的游戏。

Games have a lot of rules—how to move and what you can and cannot do—but there is one rule at the foundation of all the others: the object of the game. Games are about achieving goals—you must be able to state your game’s goal and state it clearly. Often, there is not just one goal in a game, but a sequence of them—you will need to state each and how they relate to one another. A clumsy statement of your game’s goal can be off-putting to players right from the beginning—if they don’t completely understand the purpose of their actions, they cannot proceed with any certainty. Newcomers to chess are often stymied when someone awkwardly tries to explain the object of the game: “Your goal is to put the other king in checkmate… that means you move your pieces so he can’t move without being in check… which, uh, means that one of your pieces could potentially capture him, except that, um, it’s against the rules to capture the king.” As a boy, I often wondered why a game considered to be so elegant could have such an inelegant goal. I played the game for years before I realized that the goal of chess is actually quite simple: “Capture your opponent’s king.” All the folderol about check and checkmate is simply there to politely warn your opponent that they are in imminent danger. It is remarkable how more interested a potential chess player becomes when you tell them that simple four-word goal. The same is true for any game you create—the more easily players understand the goal, the more easily they can visualize achieving it, and the more likely they are going to want to play your game.

当玩家心中设定了目标,他们就会有巨大的动力去实现它。制定一套清晰、结构良好的目标或任务对于保持玩家的参与度和积极性至关重要。好的游戏目标如下:

When a goal is set in a player’s mind, it gives them tremendous motivation to see it through. Having a clear set of well-constructed goals or quests is crucial to keeping your players engaged and motivated. Good game goals are as follows:

  1. 具体:玩家理解并能清楚地表达他们应该实现的目标。

  2. Concrete: Players understand and can clearly state what they are supposed to achieve.

  3. 可实现:玩家需要认为自己有机会实现目标。如果目标看起来不可能实现,他们就会很快放弃。

  4. Achievable: Players need to think that they have a chance of achieving the goal. If it seems impossible to them, they will quickly give up.

  5. 奖励:要让实现目标变得有奖励,需要付出很多努力。如果目标具有适当的挑战性,那么实现目标本身就是一种奖励。但为什么不更进一步呢?你可以在玩家达成目标后给予他们一些有价值的东西,从而让你的目标更有奖励——使用镜头 #20乐趣,找到奖励玩家的不同方式,让他们真正为自己的成就感到自豪。虽然奖励达成目标的玩家很重要,但让玩家在达成目标之前意识到目标的奖励也同样(或更重要),这样他们就会受到激励去尝试实现目标。但是,不要过高地期望他们,因为如果他们对达成目标的奖励感到失望,他们就不会再玩了!我们将在下一章中更多地讨论奖励。

  6. Rewarding: A lot goes into making an achieved goal rewarding. If the goal has the right level of challenge, just achieving it at all is a reward in itself. But why not go further? You can make your goal even more rewarding by giving the player something valuable upon reaching the goal—use Lens #20: Pleasure, to find different ways to reward the player and really make them proud of their achievement. And while it is important to reward players that achieve a goal, it is equally (or more) important that players appreciate that the goal is rewarding before they have achieved it, so that they are inspired to attempt to achieve it. Don’t overinflate their expectations, though, for if they are disappointed with the reward for achieving a goal, they will not play again! We will talk much more about rewards in the next chapter.

虽然游戏中的每个目标都具备这些特质很重要,但游戏中目标的平衡也很重要,有些是短期的,有些是长期的。这种目标平衡将使玩家感到他们立即知道该做什么,并且最终他们将实现一些重要而伟大的目标。

And while it is important that each of the goals in your game has these qualities, it is also important that you have a good balance of goals in your game, with some short-term and some much longer term. This balance of goals will make your players feel they know what to do immediately and that ultimately they will achieve something important and magnificent.

人们很容易过于关注比赛的情节而忘记进球。为了帮助我们记住进球的重要性,让我们将这个镜头添加到我们的工具箱中。

It is easy to focus so much on the action of a game that you forget about the goals. To help us remember the importance of goals, let’s add this lens to our toolbox.

同时拿起玩具的镜头、好奇心的镜头和目标的镜头,看看游戏的这些方面如何相互影响,这可能会很有趣。

It can be fascinating to pick up the Lens of the Toy, the Lens of Curiosity, and the Lens of Goals at the same time to see how these aspects of your game influence each other.

总结规则

Wrapping Up Rules

规则是所有游戏机制中最基本的。游戏不仅仅由其规则定义;游戏就是其规则。从规则的角度来看待你的游戏很重要,这就是镜头 #33

Rules are the most fundamental of all game mechanics. A game is not just defined by its rules; a game is its rules. It is important to view your game from a rules perspective, and that is Lens #33.

机制 6:技能

Mechanic 6: Skill

在美德中必须多提升。

(卓越有许多等级。)

—西塞罗

In virtute sunt multi ascensus.

(There are many degrees in excellence.)

—Cicero

技能机制将焦点从游戏转移到玩家身上。每款游戏都要求玩家锻炼某些技能。如果玩家的技能水平与游戏难度相匹配,玩家就会感到有挑战性并留在心流通道中(如第10 章玩家心态中所述)。

The mechanic of skill shifts the focus away from the game and onto the player. Every game requires players to exercise certain skills. If the player’s skill level is a good match to the game’s difficulty, the player will feel challenged and stay in the flow channel (as discussed in Chapter 10: Player’s Mind).

大多数游戏并不只要求玩家具备一种技能,它们需要多种技能的混合。当你设计一款游戏时,列出游戏要求玩家具备的技能列表是值得的。尽管游戏中可能包含数千种技能,但技能通常可以分为三大类:

Most games do not just require one skill from a player—they require a blend of different skills. When you design a game, it is a worthwhile exercise to make a list of the skills that your game requires from the player. Even though there are thousands of possible skills that can go into a game, skills can generally be divided into three main categories:

  1. 身体技能:这些技能包括力量、灵巧性、协调性和身体耐力。身体技能是大多数运动的重要组成部分。有效地操纵游戏控制器是一种身体技能,但许多电子游戏(例如基于摄像头的舞蹈游戏)要求玩家具备更广泛的身体技能。

  2. Physical skills: These include skills involving strength, dexterity, coordination, and physical endurance. Physical skills are an important part of most sports. Effectively manipulating a game controller is a kind of physical skill, but many videogames (such as camera-based dance games) require a broader range of physical skills from players.

  3. 智力技能:这些技能包括记忆、观察和解谜技能。尽管有些人回避需要太多智力技能的游戏,但很少有游戏不需要智力技能,因为当游戏需要做出有趣的决定时,游戏就会变得有趣,而决策是一种智力技能。

  4. Mental skills: These include the skills of memory, observation, and puzzle solving. Although some people shy away from games that require too much in the way of mental skills, it is the rare game that doesn’t involve some mental skills, because games are interesting when there are interesting decisions to make, and decision making is a mental skill.

  5. 社交技能:社交技能包括了解对手(猜测对手在想什么)、愚弄对手以及与队友协调等。通常,我们认为社交技能是指交朋友和影响他人的能力,但游戏中的社交和沟通技能范围要广泛得多。扑克在很大程度上是一种社交游戏,因为它很大程度上取决于隐藏自己的想法和猜测他人的想法。体育运动也非常具有社交性,注重团队合作和“心理战”对手。

  6. Social skills: These include, among other things, reading an opponent (guessing what they are thinking), fooling an opponent, and coordinating with teammates. Typically, we think of social skills in terms of your ability to make friends and influence people, but the range of social and communication skills in games is much wider. Poker is largely a social game, because so much of it rests on concealing your thoughts and guessing the thoughts of others. Sports are very social, as well, with their focus on teamwork and on “psyching out” your opponents.

真实技能与虚拟技能

Real vs. Virtual Skills

这里需要区分的是:当我们将技能作为一种游戏机制时,我们谈论的是玩家必须具备的真正技能。在电子游戏中,谈论角色的技能水平是很常见的。你可能会听到玩家宣布“我的战士在剑术技能上获得了两分!”但“剑术”并不是玩家所需的真正技能——玩家实际上只是在正确的时间按下控制板上的正确按钮。在这种情况下,剑术是一种虚拟技能——玩家假装拥有的技能。虚拟技能的有趣之处在于,即使玩家的实际技能没有提高,它们也可以提高。玩家可能像以前一样粗心地按下控制器按钮,但通过按下足够多的按钮,他们可能会获得更高级别的虚拟技能,这使他们的角色成为更快、更强大的剑客。许多“免费”游戏都有一套基于购买虚拟技能的整套盈利策略。

It is important to draw a distinction here: When we talk about skill as a game mechanic, we are talking about a real skill the player must have. In videogames, it is common to talk about your character’s skill level. You might hear a player announce “My warrior just gained two points on his sword fighting skill!” But “sword fighting” is not a real skill required of the player—the player is really just pushing the right buttons on the control pad at the right time. Sword fighting, in this context, is a virtual skill—one that the player is pretending to have. The interesting thing about virtual skills is that they can improve even though the player’s actual skill does not. The player might be just as sloppy at mashing the controller buttons as they ever were, but by mashing them enough times, they might be rewarded with a higher level of virtual skill, which allows their character to become a faster, more powerful swordfighter. Many “free-to-play” games have a whole monetization strategy based on the purchase of virtual skills.

虚拟技能是让玩家感受到力量的绝佳方式。但过度使用虚拟技能会让人感觉空洞——一些大型多人游戏的批评者抱怨说,过于强调虚拟技能,而对真实技能重视不够。通常,游戏趣味的关键在于找到真实技能和虚拟技能的正确组合。许多新手设计师会混淆这两者——重要的是,你要在心中清楚地区分它们。

Virtual skills are a great way to give a player a feeling of power. Taken too far, it can feel hollow—some critics of massively multiplayer games complain that there is too much emphasis on virtual skills, and not enough on real skills. Often, the key to a fun game is finding the right mix of real and virtual skills. Many novice designers confuse the two—it is important that you draw a clear distinction between them in your mind.

列举技能

Enumerating Skills

列出游戏中所需的所有技能是非常有用的。你可以列一个笼统的清单:“我的游戏需要记忆、解决问题和模式匹配技能。”或者你也可以把它列得很具体:“我的游戏要求玩家在脑海中快速识别并在脑海中旋转特定的二维形状,同时解决基于网格的打包问题。” 列出技能可能非常棘手——一个有趣的例子来自任天堂娱乐系统 (NES) 的赛车游戏RC Pro Am。在其中,玩家用游戏手柄(左手拇指)操纵汽车,用 A 按钮(右手拇指)加速,用 B 按钮(也是右手拇指)向对手射击。要掌握这个游戏,需要两项令人惊讶的技能——第一是解决问题。通常在 NES 游戏中,你一次只按一个按钮——当你想按 B 按钮时,就把拇指从 A 按钮上拿开。但在RC Pro Am中,这很糟糕——这意味着如果你想发射火箭(B 按钮),你必须松开汽车的油门(A 按钮),而你的对手会迅速加速!如何解决这个问题?有些玩家尝试用拇指按一个按钮,用手指按另一个按钮,但这很尴尬,让游戏太难玩了。最好的解决方案似乎是控制器的新握法:你将拇指侧放在 A 按钮上,这样当你偶尔想按 B 按钮时,你可以平稳地将其向下滚动到 B 按钮上,而无需松开油门。一旦玩家解决了这个问题,他们就需要练习这种非常具体的身体技能。当然,游戏中还涉及许多其他技能——管理资源(导弹和地雷,这样你就不会耗尽资源)、记住赛道、对急转弯和意想不到的道路危险做出反应等等。关键是,即使是看起来有些简单的游戏也可能需要玩家掌握许多不同的技能。作为设计师,你需要知道这些技能是什么。

Making a list of all the skills required in your game can be a very useful exercise. You might make a general list: “my game requires memory, problem solving, and pattern matching skills.” Or you might make it very specific: “my game requires players to quickly identify and mentally rotate specific two-dimensional shapes in their heads, while solving a grid-based packing problem.” Listing skills can be very tricky—one interesting example comes from the game RC Pro Am, a racing game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). In it, players steer the car with the joypad (left thumb), accelerate with the A button (right thumb), and fire weapons at opponents with the B button (also right thumb). To master this game, two surprising skills were required—the first was problem solving. Generally on NES games, you only push one button at a time—you take your thumb off the A button when you want to push the B button. But in RC Pro Am, this is disastrous—it means that if you want to fire a rocket (the B button), you have to release the car’s accelerator (the A button), and your opponent quickly speeds away! How to solve this problem? Some players try using a thumb for one button and finger for the other, but this is awkward and makes the game too hard to play. The best solution seems to involve a new grip on the controller: you hold your thumb sideways on the A button, so that when you want to occasionally push the B button, you can roll it down onto the B button smoothly, without releasing the accelerator. Once the player has solved this problem, they then need to practice this very specific physical skill. And of course, there are many other skills involved in the game—managing resources (missiles and mines, so you don’t run out), memorizing race courses, reacting to sharp turns and unexpected road hazards, and many more. The point is that even a game that seems somewhat simple might require many different skills from a player. As a designer, you need to know what these are.

你很容易误以为你的游戏只注重一项技能,而实际上其他技能更为重要。许多动作类视频游戏表面上似乎主要注重快速对对手做出反应,而事实上你需要解决大量谜题才能找到正确的反应方式,还需要大量记忆以避免在下次玩特定关卡时措手不及。设计师常常会失望地发现,他们原以为的游戏注重快速决策和随机应变,但游戏实际上是关于记住哪些敌人会在什么时候出现 — — 这对玩家来说是一种非常不同(且更加乏味)的体验。玩家所运用的技能在很大程度上决定了玩家体验的性质,因此你必须知道这些技能是什么。从这个角度看待你的游戏就是镜头 #34

It is easy to fool yourself into thinking your game is about one skill, when other skills are actually more important. Many action-based videogames seem, on the surface, to be mainly about quickly reacting to opponents, when in truth there is a lot of puzzle solving required to figure out the right way to react to them and a lot of memorization required to avoid being surprised next time you play a given level. Designers are often disappointed to realize that a game they thought was about quick decisions and thinking on your feet is really about memorizing which enemies pop out at what time—a very different (and much more tedious) experience for the player. The skills that a player exercises go a long way toward determining the nature of that player’s experience, so you must know what these are. Viewing your game from this perspective is Lens #34.

机制 7:机会

Mechanic 7: Chance

我们的第七个也是最后一个游戏机制是机会。我们最后处理它是因为它涉及所有其他六个机制之间的相互作用:空间、时间、物体、动作、规则和技能。

Our seventh and final game mechanic is chance. We deal with it last because it concerns interactions between all of the other six mechanics: space, time, objects, actions, rules, and skills.

机会是趣味游戏不可或缺的一部分,因为机会意味着不确定性,不确定性意味着惊喜。正如我们之前讨论过的(镜头 4),惊喜是人类快乐的重要来源,也是乐趣的秘密成分。

Chance is an essential part of a fun game because chance means uncertainty, and uncertainty means surprises. And as we have discussed earlier (Lens #4), surprises are an important source of human pleasure and the secret ingredient of fun.

我们现在必须谨慎行事。你永远不能把机会视为理所当然,因为它非常棘手——数学可能很难,我们对它的直觉往往错了。但优秀的游戏设计师必须成为机会和概率的大师,根据自己的意愿进行雕琢,创造出一种总是充满挑战性决策和有趣惊喜的体验。理解机会的挑战可以通过一个关于概率数学发明的故事得到很好的说明——毫不奇怪,概率数学的发明就是为了游戏设计。

We must now proceed with caution. You can never take chance for granted, for it is very tricky—the math can be difficult, and our intuitions about it are often wrong. But a good game designer must become the master of chance and probability, sculpting it to her will, to create an experience that is always full of challenging decisions and interesting surprises. The challenges of understanding chance are well illustrated by a story about the invention of the mathematics of probability—invented, not surprisingly, for the express purpose of game design.

概率的发明

Invention of Probability

Il est tres bon esprit, mais quel dommage, il n'est pas geometre。

(他是个好人,但不幸的是,他不是数学家。)

——帕斯卡对费马谈到梅雷骑士

Il est tres bon ésprit, mais quel dommage, il n’est pas geometre.

(He’s a nice guy, but unfortunately, no mathematician.)

—Pascal to Fermat regarding the Chevalier de Méré

那是 1654 年,法国贵族 Antoine Gombaud,即 Chevalier de Méré(发音为“Shevulyay duh Mayray”),遇到了一个问题。他是一个狂热的赌徒,一直在玩一种游戏,他会打赌如果他掷一个骰子四次,至少有一次会是六点。他从这个游戏中赚了不少钱,但他的朋友们厌倦了输钱,拒绝再和他玩了。为了找到一种新的方法来欺骗他的朋友,他发明了一种他认为与上一个概率相同的新游戏。在他的新游戏中,他会打赌如果他掷一对骰子二十四次,至少会出现一次十二点。他的朋友们一开始很谨慎,但很快就喜欢上了他的新游戏,因为这位骑士开始快速输钱!他很困惑,因为根据他的计算,这两种游戏的赔率相同。骑士的理由如下:

It was the year 1654, and French nobleman Antoine Gombaud, the Chevalier de Méré (pronounced “Shevulyay duh Mayray”), had a problem. He was an avid gambler and had been playing a game where he would bet that if he rolled a single die four times, at least one time it would come up as a six. He had made some good money from this game, but his friends got tired of losing and refused to play it with him any further. Trying to find a new way to fleece his friends, he invented a new game that he believed had the same odds as the last one. In his new game, he would bet that if he rolled a pair of dice twenty-four times, a twelve would come up at least once. His friends were wary at first but soon grew to like his new game, because the Chevalier started losing money fast! He was confused, because by his math, both games had the same odds. Chevalier’s reasoning was as follows:

第一局:掷一个骰子四次,如果至少出现一个六点,骑士获胜。

First Game: In four rolls of a single die, the Chevalier wins if at least one six comes up.

骑士推断,单个骰子掷出 6 的概率是 1/6,因此掷骰子四次意味着获胜的概率是

The Chevalier reasoned that the chance of a single die coming up 6 was 1/6, and therefore rolling a die four times should mean the chance of winning was

4 × (1/6) = 4/6 = 66%,这解释了为什么他总是能获胜。

4 × (1/6) = 4/6 = 66%, which explained why he tended to win.

第二场游戏:掷一对骰子二十四次,只要至少出现一个 12,骑士就获胜。

Second Game: In twenty-four rolls of a pair of dice, the Chevalier wins if at least one 12 comes up.

骑士确定掷出一对骰子得到 12(双六)的概率是 1/36。因此,他推断掷骰子 24 次意味着概率应该是

The Chevalier determined that the chance of getting a 12 (double sixes) on a pair of dice was 1/36. He reasoned, then, that rolling the dice twenty-four times meant the odds should be

24 × (1/36) = 24/36 = 2/3 = 66%。与上一场比赛的赔率相同!

24 × (1/36) = 24/36 = 2/3 = 66%. The same odds as the last game!

困惑不已、损失惨重的他给数学家布莱斯·帕斯卡写了一封信,寻求建议。帕斯卡发现这个问题很有趣——没有现成的数学来回答这些问题。帕斯卡随后写信给他父亲的朋友皮埃尔·德·费马寻求帮助。帕斯卡和费马开始了漫长的通信,关于这个问题和类似的问题,并在发现解决这些问题的方法时,建立了概率论作为数学的一个新分支。

Confused and losing money, he wrote a letter to mathematician Blaise Pascal, asking for advice. Pascal found the problem intriguing—there was no established mathematics to answer these questions. Pascal then wrote to his father’s friend, Pierre de Fermat, for help. Pascal and Fermat began a lengthy correspondence about this and similar problems and, in discovering methods of solving them, established probability theory as a new branch of mathematics.

Chevalier 游戏的真实赔率是多少?要理解这一点,我们必须进行一些数学运算——别担心,这是任何人都能做的简单数学运算。游戏设计不需要完全涵盖概率数学(并且超出了本书的范围),但了解一些基础知识会非常方便。如果你是数学天才,你可以跳过本节,或者至少得意地读一读。对于我们其他人,我提出以下内容:

What are the real odds of Chevalier’s games? To understand that, we have to get into some math—don’t fret, it’s easy math that anyone can do. Fully covering the mathematics of probability is not necessary for game design (and beyond the scope of this book), but knowing some of the basics can be quite handy. If you are a math genius, you can skip this section, or at least read it smugly. For the rest of us, I present the following:

每个游戏设计师都应该知道的十条概率规则

Ten Rules of Probability Every Game Designer Should Know

规则 1:分数是小数,百分数是百分数

如果您是那些一直对分数和百分数感到困惑的人之一,那么是时候面对并处理它们了,因为它们是概率语言。不要紧张——您可以随时使用计算器——没有人会看。您必须掌握的是,分数、小数和百分数都是相同的东西,可以互换使用。换句话说,½ = 0.5 = 50%。它们不是三个不同的数字;它们只是完全相同数字的三种书写方式。

If you are one of those people who has always had a hard time with fractions and percents, it’s time to face up and deal with them, because they are the language of probability. Don’t stress—you can always use a calculator—no one is looking. The thing you have to come to grips with is that fractions, decimals, and percents are all the same thing and can be used interchangeably. In other words, ½ = 0.5 = 50%. Those aren’t three different numbers; they are just three ways of writing exactly the same number.

将分数转换为小数很容易。想知道 33/50 的十进制等值数吗?只需在计算器中输入 33 ÷ 50,就会得到 0.66。百分数呢?也很容易。如果在字典中查找“百分比”这个词,您会发现它的实际含义是“每 100”。因此,66% 的实际含义是每 100 个中有 66 个,或者 66/100,或者 0.66。如果查看 Chevalier 之前的数学运算,就会明白为什么我们需要如此频繁地来回转换——作为人类,我们喜欢用百分比来谈论,但我们也喜欢谈论“六分之一的机会”——因此我们需要一种在这两种形式之间进行转换的方法。如果您是那种患有数学焦虑症的人,那么只需放松并在计算器上练习一些这些内容——您很快就会掌握它。

Converting from fractions to decimals is easy. Need to know the decimal equivalent of 33/50? Just type 33 ÷ 50 into your calculator, and you’ll get 0.66. What about percents? They’re easy too. If you look up the word “percent” in the dictionary, you’ll see that it really means “per 100.” So, 66% really means 66 per 100, or 66/100, or 0.66. If you look at Chevalier’s previous math, you’ll see why we need to convert back and forth so often—as humans, we like to talk in percents, but we also like to talk about “one chance in six”—so we need a way to convert between these forms. If you are the kind of person who suffers from math anxiety, just relax and practice a few of these on the calculator—you’ll have the hang of it in no time.

规则2:从零到一——就这样!

这个很简单。概率只能在 0% 到 100% 之间,也就是从 0 到 1(参见规则 1),不多不少。虽然你可以说某件事发生的概率是 10%,但是不存在 -10% 的概率,当然也没有 110% 的概率。0% 的概率意味着它不会发生,而 100% 的概率意味着它肯定会发生。这一切可能听起来很明显,但它指出了 Chevalier 的数学存在一个主要问题。考虑他用四个骰子玩的第一场游戏。他相信用四个骰子,他有 4 × (1/6),或 4/6,或 0.66,或 66% 的概率掷出六点。但是如果他有七个骰子呢?那么他获胜的概率就是 7 × (1/6),或 7/6,或 1.17,或 117%!这显然是错误的——如果你掷骰子七次,其中一次出现六点的可能性很大,但并不能保证(事实上,概率约为 72%)。只要您计算出的概率大于 100%(或小于 0%),您就肯定知道自己做错了。

This one’s easy. Probabilities can only range from 0% to 100%, that is, from 0 to 1 (see Rule #1), no less and no more. While you can say there is a 10% chance of something happening, there is no such thing as a −10% chance and certainly no such thing as a 110% chance. A 0% chance of something happening means it won’t happen, and a 100% chance means it definitely will. This all might sound obvious, but it points out a major problem with Chevalier’s math. Consider his first game with the four dice. He believed that with four dice, he had a 4 × (1/6), or 4/6, or 0.66, or 66% chance of having a six come up. But what if he had seven dice? Then he would have had 7 × (1/6) or 7/6 or 1.17 or 117% chance of winning! And that is certainly wrong—if you roll a die seven times, it might be likely that a six will come up one of those times, but it is not guaranteed (in fact, it is about a 72% chance). Anytime you calculate a probability that comes up greater than 100% (or less than 0%), you know for certain that you’ve done something wrong.

规则 3:“期望”除以“可能的结果”等于概率

前两条规则奠定了一些基本基础,但现在我们要讨论什么是真正的概率——它非常简单。你只需将你“寻找的”结果出现的次数除以可能结果的数量(假设这些结果出现的可能性相同),就可以得到结果。掷骰子时出现六的概率是多少?好吧,有六种可能的结果,其中只有一种是我们正在寻找的结果,因此出现六的概率是 1 ÷ 6,即 1/6,约 17%。掷骰子时出现偶数的概率是多少?有 3 个偶数,所以答案是 3/6,即 50%。从一副牌中抽出一张人头牌的概率是多少?一副牌中有十二张人头牌,总共五十二张牌,所以抽到人头牌的概率是 12/52,即约 23%。如果你理解了这一点,你就掌握了概率的基本概念。

The first two rules lay some basic groundwork, but now we are going to talk about what probability really is—and it is quite simple. You just take the number of times your “looked for” outcome can come up and divide by the number of possible outcomes (assuming your outcomes are equally likely), and you’ve got it. What is the chance of a six coming up when you roll a die? Well, there are six possible outcomes, and only one of them is the one we are looking for, so the chance of a six coming up is 1 ÷ 6, or 1/6, or about 17%. What is the chance of an even number coming up when you roll a die? There are 3 even numbers, so the answer is 3/6, or 50%. What is the chance of drawing a face card from a deck of cards? There are twelve face cards in a deck, and fifty-two cards total, so your chances of getting a face card are 12/52, or about 23%. If you understand this, you’ve got the fundamental idea of probability.

规则4:枚举!

如果规则 3 听起来简单(事实也确实如此),那么你可能会想知道为什么概率如此棘手。原因是我们需要的两个数字(“期望”结果的数量和可能结果的数量)并不总是那么明显。例如,如果我问你抛硬币三次并至少两次出现“正面”的概率是多少,那么“期望”结果的数量是多少?如果你不用写下任何东西就能回答这个问题,那我会很惊讶。找出答案的一个简单方法是列举所有可能的结果:

If Rule #3 is as simple as it sounds (and it is), you might wonder why probability is so tricky. The reason is that the two numbers we need (the number of “looked for” outcomes and the number of possible outcomes) are not always so obvious. For example, if I asked you what the odds of flipping a coin three times and getting “heads” at least twice, what is the number of “looked for” outcomes? I’d be surprised if you could answer that without writing anything down. An easy way to find out the answer is to enumerate all the possible outcomes:

  1. 霍霍霍

  2. HHH

  3. 高血压

  4. HHT

  5. 高血压

  6. HTH

  7. 高温热释光

  8. HTT

  9. 甲状腺激素

  10. THH

  11. 甲状腺激素

  12. THT

  13. 甲状腺功能亢进症

  14. TTH

  15. 特快专递

  16. TTT

总共有八种可能的结果。哪​​些结果至少出现两次正面?#1、#2、#3 和 #5。这是 8 种可能性中的 4 种结果,因此答案是 4/8,即 50% 的概率。那么,为什么骑士不在他的游戏中这样做呢?在他的第一款游戏中,有四次掷骰子,这意味着 6 × 6 × 6 × 6,即 1296 种可能性。这项工作可能很枯燥,但他可以在一小时左右的时间内列举出所有可能性(列表看起来应该是 1111、1112、1113、1114、1115、1116、1121、1122、1123 等),然后计算出其中包含 6 的组合数(671),并将其除以 1296 得到答案。如果有时间,列举可以让你解决几乎任何概率问题。不过,考虑一下骑士的第二个游戏:24 次投掷 2 个骰子!2 个骰子有 36 种可能的结果,因此列举所有 24 次投掷意味着写下 36 24(37 位数字)种组合。即使他能以某种方式在一秒钟内写下一个组合,列出所有组合也需要比宇宙年龄更长的时间。枚举很方便,但是当花费的时间太长时,您需要走捷径——这就是其他规则的用途。

There are exactly eight possible outcomes. Which ones have heads at least twice? #1, #2, #3, and #5. That’s 4 outcomes out of 8 possibilities, so the answer is 4/8, or a 50% chance. Now, why didn’t the Chevalier do this with his games? With his first game, there were four die rolls, which means 6 × 6 × 6 × 6, or 1296 possibilities. It would have been dull work, but he could have enumerated all the possibilities in an hour or so (the list would have looked like 1111, 1112, 1113, 1114, 1115, 1116, 1121, 1122, 1123, etc.), then counted up the number of combinations that had a six in them (671), and divided that by 1296 for his answer. Enumeration will let you solve almost any probability problem, if you have the time. Consider the Chevalier’s second game, though: 24 rolls of 2 dice! There are 36 possible outcomes for 2 dice, and so enumerating all 24 rolls would have meant writing down 3624 (a number 37 digits long) combinations. Even if he could somehow write down one combination a second, it would have taken longer than the age of the universe to list them all. Enumeration is handy, but when it takes too long, you need to take shortcuts—and that’s what the other rules are for.

规则 5:在某些情况下,OR 表示添加

我们经常想确定“这个或那个”发生的概率,比如从一副牌中抽出一张人头牌或一张 A 的概率是多少?当我们谈论的两件事是互斥的,也就是说,当它们不可能同时发生时,你可以将它们各自的概率相加得到一个总体概率。例如,抽出一张人头牌的概率是 12/52,抽出一张 A 的概率是 4/52。由于这些是互斥事件(它们不可能同时发生),我们可以将它们相加:12/52 + 4/52 = 16/52,或大约 31% 的概率。

Very often, we want to determine the chances of “this OR that” happening, such as what are the chances of drawing a face card OR an ace from a deck of cards? When the two things we are talking about are mutually exclusive, that is, when it is impossible for both of them to happen simultaneously, you can add their individual probabilities to get an overall probability. For example, the chances of drawing a face card are 12/52, and the chances of drawing an ace are 4/52. Since these are mutually exclusive events (it is impossible for them both to happen at once), we can add them up: 12/52 + 4/52 = 16/52, or about a 31% chance.

但是如果我们问一个不同的问题:从一副牌中抽出一张 A 或一张方块的概率是多少?如果我们将这些概率相加,我们会得到 4/52 + 13/52(一副牌中有 13 张方块)= 17/52。但是,如果我们枚举,我们会发现这是错误的——正确答案是 16/52。为什么?因为这两种情况并不相互排斥——我可以抽出方块 A!由于这种情况并不相互排斥,“或”并不意味着相加。

But what if we asked a different question: What are the chances of drawing an ace from a deck of cards or a diamond? If we add these probabilities, we get 4/52 + 13/52 (13 diamonds in a deck) = 17/52. But, if we enumerate, we see this is wrong—the right answer is 16/52. Why? Because the two cases are not mutually exclusive—I could draw the ace of diamonds! Since this case is not mutually exclusive, “or” does not mean add.

让我们看看 Chevalier 的第一场比赛。他似乎试图将这个规则用于他的掷骰子——将四个概率相加:1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6。但他得到了错误的答案,因为这四个事件并不相互排斥。加法规则很方便,但你必须确保你加起来的事件是相互排斥的。

Let’s look at Chevalier’s first game. He seems to be trying to use this rule for his die rolls—adding up four probabilities: 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6 + 1/6. But he gets the wrong answer, because the four events are not mutually exclusive. The addition rule is handy, but you must be certain the events you are adding up are mutually exclusive from one another.

规则 6:在某些情况下,“与”表示相乘

这条规则几乎与上一条相反!如果我们想找到两件事同时发生的概率,我们可以将它们的概率相乘来得到答案——但前提是这两个事件不相互排斥!考虑两次掷骰子。如果我们想找到两次掷出六点的概率,我们可以将两个事件的概率相乘:一次掷骰子得到六点的概率是 1/6,第二次掷骰子也是 1/6。所以得到两个六点的概率是 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/36。当然,你也可以通过枚举来确定,但这是一种更快的方法。

This rule is almost the opposite of the previous one! If we want to find the probability of two things happening simultaneously, we can multiply their probabilities to get the answer—but ONLY if the two events are NOT mutually exclusive! Consider two die rolls. If we want to find the probability of rolling a six on both rolls, we can multiply together the probabilities of the two events: The chance of getting a six on one die roll is 1/6, and also 1/6 for a second die roll. So the chance of getting two sixes is 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/36. You could also have determined that by enumeration, of course, but this is a much speedier way to do it.

在规则 5 中,我们询问从一副牌中抽出 A 或方块的概率——该规则不成立,因为这两个事件并不相互排斥。那么,如果我们询问抽出 A 和方块的概率呢?换句话说,抽出方块 A 的概率是多少?答案是 1/52,这应该相当直观,但我们可以使用规则 6 来检查,因为我们知道这两个事件并不相互排斥。抽出 A 的概率是 4/52,抽出方块的概率是 13/52。将它们相乘,4/52 × 13/52 = 52/2704 = 1/52。因此,该规则有效并且符合我们的直觉。

In Rule #5, we asked for the probability of drawing an ace OR a diamond from a deck of cards—the rule failed, because the two events were not mutually exclusive. So what if we asked about the probability of drawing an ace AND a diamond? In other words, what is the probability of drawing the ace of diamonds? It should be fairly intuitive that the answer is 1/52, but we can check that with Rule #6, since we know the two events are not mutually exclusive. The chance of getting an ace is 4/52, and the chance of a diamond is 13/52. Multiplying them, 4/52 × 13/52 = 52/2704 = 1/52. So, the rule works and matches our intuition.

我们是否有足够的规则来解决 Chevalier 的问题?让我们来考虑一下他的第一场比赛:

Do we have enough rules yet to solve Chevalier’s problems? Let’s consider his first game:

第一局:掷一个骰子四次,如果至少出现一个六点,骑士获胜。

First Game: In four rolls of a single die, the Chevalier wins if at least one six comes up.

我们已经确定可以枚举这个并得到答案 671/1296,但这需要一个小时。有没有更快的方法,使用我们已有的规则?

We’ve already established that we could enumerate this and get the answer 671/1296, but that would take an hour. Is there a quicker way, using the rules we have?

(我现在警告你——这有点棘手。如果你真的不那么在意,那就省点力气,直接跳到规则 7。如果你真的在意,那就继续——你会发现这是值得的。)

(I’ll warn you now—this gets a little hairy. If you don’t really care that much, save yourself the headache, and just skip to Rule #7. If you do care, then press on—you will find it worth the effort.)

如果问题是关于掷骰子四次并得到四个六点的概率,那么这将是四个不互斥事件的 AND 问题,我们可以直接使用规则 6:1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/1296。但这不是所问的。这是一个四个不互斥事件的 OR 问题(骑士有可能在四次掷骰子中得到多个六点)。那么我们能做什么?好吧,一种方法是将其分解为互斥事件,然后将它们相加。另一种表达这个游戏的方式是

If the question was about the chances of rolling a die four times and getting four sixes, that would be an AND question for four events that are not mutually exclusive, and we could just use Rule #6: 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 = 1/1296. But that isn’t what is asked. This is an OR question for four events that are not mutually exclusive (it is possible for the Chevalier to get multiple sixes on the four rolls). So what can we do? Well, one way is to break it down into events that are mutually exclusive and then add them up. Another way to phrase this game is

掷四个骰子,得到

What are the chances of rolling four dice, and getting either

  1. 四个六,或

  2. Four sixes, OR

  3. 三个六和一个非六,或

  4. Three sixes and one non-six, OR

  5. 两个六和两个非六,或

  6. Two sixes and two non-sixes, OR

  7. 一个六和三个非六

  8. One six and three non-sixes

这听起来可能有点复杂,但这是四个不同的互斥事件,如果我们能计算出每个事件的概率,我们就可以将它们相加并得到答案。我们已经使用规则 6 计算出了 (a) 的概率:1/1296。那么 (b) 呢?实际上,(b) 是四种不同的互斥可能性:

That might sound a little complicated, but it is four different mutually exclusive events, and if we can figure the probability of each, we can just add them up and get our answer. We’ve already figured out the probability of (a), using Rule #6: 1/1296. So, how about (b)? Really, (b) is four different mutually exclusive possibilities:

  1. 6、6、6、非6

  2. 6, 6, 6, non-six

  3. 6, 6, 非 6, 6

  4. 6, 6, non-six, 6

  5. 6, 非六, 6, 6,

  6. 6, non-six, 6, 6,

  7. 非六,6,6,6

  8. Non-six, 6, 6, 6

掷出六点的概率是 1/6,掷出非六点的概率是 5/6。因此,这四个点的概率分别为 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 × 5/6 = 5/1296。现在,如果我们将四个点相加,结果为 20/1296。因此,(b) 的概率为 20/1296。

The probability of rolling a six is 1/6, the probability of rolling a non-six is 5/6. So, the probability of each of those is 1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 × 5/6 = 5/1296. Now, if we add up all four, that comes to 20/1296. So, the probability of (b) is 20/1296.

(c) 怎么样?这个和上一个一样,但组合更多。要弄清楚有多少种方式可以恰好出现两个六和两个非六,这很棘手,但有六种方式:

How about (c)? This one is the same as the last, but there are more combinations. It is tricky to figure out how many ways there are for exactly two sixes and two non-sixes to come up, but there are six ways:

  1. 6,6,非6,非6

  2. 6, 6, non-six, non-six

  3. 6,非六,6,非六

  4. 6, non-six, 6, non-six

  5. 6,非6,非6,6

  6. 6, non-six, non-six, 6

  7. 非六,6,6,非六

  8. non-six, 6, 6, non-six

  9. 非六,6,非六,6

  10. non-six, 6, non-six, 6

  11. 非六,非六,6,6

  12. non-six, non-six, 6, 6

上述每个数字的概率为 1/6 × 1/6 × 5/6 × 5/6 = 25/1296。将这六个数字相加,结果为 150/1296。

And the probability of each of these is 1/6 × 1/6 × 5/6 × 5/6 = 25/1296. Adding up all six of them comes to 150/1296.

这样就只剩下 (d),它是 (b) 的逆:

This leaves only (d), which is the inverse of (b):

  1. 非六,非六,非六,6

  2. Non-six, non-six, non-six, 6

  3. 非六,非六,6,非六

  4. Non-six, non-six, 6, non-six

  5. 非六,6,非六,非六

  6. Non-six, 6, non-six, non-six

  7. 6、非六、非六、非六

  8. 6, non-six, non-six, non-six

每个概率为 5/6 × 5/6 × 5/6 × 1/6 = 125/1296。将四个概率相加得出 500/1296。

The probability of each is 5/6 × 5/6 × 5/6 × 1/6 = 125/1296. Adding up all four gives 500/1296.

因此,我们现在计算出了四个互斥事件的概率:

So, we have now calculated the probability of the four mutually exclusive events:

  1. 四个六——(1/1296)

  2. Four sixes—(1/1296)

  3. 三个六和一个非六—(20/1296)

  4. Three sixes and one non-six—(20/1296)

  5. 两个六和两个非六—(150/1296)

  6. Two sixes and two non-sixes—(150/1296)

  7. 一个六和三个非六—(500/1296)

  8. One six and three non-sixes—(500/1296)

将这四个概率相加(如规则 5 所允许),得出的总数为 671/1296,即约 51.77%。因此,我们可以看出,这对骑士来说是一场好游戏——通过超过 50% 的获胜机会,他最终可能会获利,但游戏结果非常接近,他的朋友们相信他们有机会获胜——至少在一段时间内。这肯定与骑士认为的 66% 获胜概率大不相同!

Adding up those four probabilities (as Rule #5 allows) gives us a total of 671/1296, or about 51.77%. So, we can see that this was a good game for the Chevalier—by winning more than 50% of the time, he eventually was likely to make a profit, but the game was close enough to even that his friends believed they had a chance—at least for a while. It certainly is a very different result than the 66% chance of winning the Chevalier believed he had!

这与我们通过枚举得到的答案相同,但速度要快得多。实际上,我们做的是一种枚举——只是枚举规则加法和乘法让我们可以更快地计算出所有数字。我们能用同样的方式得到 Chevalier 的第二局游戏的答案吗?我们可以,但是要掷 24 次两颗骰子,可能需要一个小时甚至更长时间!这比枚举要快,但是我们可以通过巧妙的方法来做得更好——这就是规则 7 的作用所在。

This is the same answer we could have gotten from enumeration, but much faster. Really, though, we did a kind of enumeration—it is just that the rules of addition and multiplication let us count everything up much faster. Could we do the same thing to get the answer to Chevalier’s second game? We could, but with 24 rolls of two dice, it would probably take an hour or more! This is faster than enumeration, but we can do even better by being tricky—that’s where Rule #7 comes in.

规则 7:一减“做”=“不做”

这是一个更直观的规则。如果某件事发生的概率是 10%,那么它不发生的概率就是 90%。为什么这很有用?因为通常很难确定某件事发生的概率,但很容易确定它不发生的概率。

This is a more intuitive rule. If the chance of something happening is 10%, the chance of it not happening is 90%. Why is this useful? Because often it is quite hard to figure out the chance of something happening but easy to figure out the chance of it NOT happening.

考虑一下 Chevalier 的第二场比赛。要计算出在 24 次掷骰子中至少出现一次双六的概率将是一个噩梦,因为您需要将许多不同的可能事件加在一起(1 个双六,23 个非双六;2 个双六,22 个非双六;等等)。另一方面,如果我们问一个不同的问题:掷两个骰子 24 次而不得到双六的概率是多少?这现在是一个 AND 问题,用于不互斥的事件,因此我们可以使用规则 6 来获得答案!但首先我们将使用规则 7 两次 - 注意。

Consider Chevalier’s second game. To figure out the chance of double sixes coming up at least once on twenty-four die rolls would be nightmarish to figure out, because you have so many different possible events to add together (1 double sixes, 23 non–double sixes; 2 double sixes, 22 non–double sixes; etc.). On the other hand, what if we ask a different question: What are the chances of rolling two dice twenty-four times and NOT getting double sixes? That is now an AND question, for events that are not mutually exclusive, so we can use Rule #6 to get the answer! But first we’ll use Rule #7 twice—watch.

一次掷骰子出现两个六的概率是 1/36。因此,根据规则 7,不出现两个六的概率是 1 − 1/36,即 35/36。

The chance of double sixes coming up on a single roll of the dice is 1/36. So, by Rule #7, the chance of not getting double sixes is 1 − 1/36, or 35/36.

因此,使用规则 6(乘法),连续 24 次不出现双六的概率是 35/36 × 35/36 24 次,或者我们说 (35/36) 24。你不会想手工做这个计算,但使用计算器,你会发现答案大约是 0.5086,即 50.86%。但这就是骑士输的概率。要找到骑士获胜的概率,我们再次应用规则 7:1 − 0.5086 = 0.4914,即大约 49.14%。现在很清楚他为什么会输掉这场比赛了!他获胜的几率非常接近,他很难判断这是一场赢还是输的游戏,但玩了很多次之后,他很可能会输。

So, using Rule #6 (multiplication), the chances of not getting double sixes twenty-four times in a row is 35/36 × 35/36 twenty-four times, or as we say (35/36)24. You would not want to do this calculation by hand, but using a calculator, you find the answer is around 0.5086, or 50.86%. But that is the chance of the Chevalier losing. To find the chance of the Chevalier winning, we apply Rule #7 again: 1 − 0.5086 = 0.4914, or about 49.14%. Now it is clear why he lost this game! His chances of winning were close enough to even that it was hard for him to tell if this was a winning or losing game, but after playing many times, he was very likely to lose.

尽管所有概率问题都可以通过枚举来解决,但规则 7 可以成为一条非常方便的捷径。事实上,我们可以使用相同的规则来解决骑士的第一场比赛!

Even though all probability problems can be solved through enumeration, Rule #7 can be a really handy shortcut. In fact, we could have used the same rule to solve the Chevalier’s first game!

规则#8:多个线性随机选择的总和不是线性随机选择!

不要惊慌。这听起来很难,但实际上很容易。“线性随机选择”只是一个随机事件,其中所有结果都有同等的发生概率。掷骰子就是线性随机选择的一个很好的例子。但是,如果你把多次掷骰子加起来,可能的结果就不会有同等的发生概率。例如,如果你掷两个骰子,你得到七点的概率非常很好,但得到 12 分的机会很小。列举所有可能性可以告诉你为什么:

Don’t panic. This one sounds hard, but it is really easy. A “linear random selection” is simply a random event where all the outcomes have an equal chance of happening. A die roll is a great example of a linear random selection. If you add up multiple die rolls, though, the possible outcomes do NOT have an equal chance of happening. If you roll two dice, for example, your chance of getting a seven is very good, while your chance of getting a twelve is small. Enumerating all the possibilities shows you why:

图像

看看有多少个 7,却只有一个小十二!我们可以用一张称为概率分布曲线的图表(见图12.15)来显示这一点,以直观地看到每个总数出现的概率。

Look at how many 7’s there are and only one little twelve! We can show this in a graph (see Figure 12.15), called a probability distribution curve, to visually see the chances of each total coming up.

规则 8 似乎是一个非常明显的规则,但我经常发现新手游戏设计师会犯这样的错误:将两个随机选择的数字相加,却没有意识到其效果。有时,这正是您想要的效果——在游戏《龙与地下城》中,玩家通过投掷三个六面骰子来生成(虚拟)技能属性,其值范围从 3 到 18。结果,您会看到很多属性值在 10 或 11 左右,但很少有属性值在 3 或 18 左右,这正是设计师想要的。如果玩家只需投掷一个二十面骰子来获得属性,游戏会有什么不同?

Rule #8 might seem like a very obvious rule, but I frequently find novice game designers make the mistake of adding together two randomly selected numbers without realizing its effect. Sometimes, it is exactly the effect you want—in the game Dungeons and Dragons, players generate (virtual) skill attributes with values ranging from 3 to 18 by rolling three six-sided dice. As a result, you see a lot of attribute values around 10 or 11, but very few at 3 or 18, and this is exactly what the designers wanted. How would the game be different if players simply rolled a single twenty-sided die to get their attributes?

想要在游戏中使用机会机制作为工具的游戏设计师必须知道他们想要什么样的概率分布曲线,并知道如何获得它。通过练习,概率分布曲线将成为您工具箱中非常有价值的工具。

Game designers who want to use mechanic of chance as a tool in their games must know what kind of probability distribution curve they want and know how to get it. With practice, probability distribution curves will be a very valuable tool in your toolbox.



12.15

FIGURE

12.15

规则9:掷骰子

到目前为止,我们讨论的概率都是理论概率,即从数学上来说应该发生的事情。还有实际概率,它是对已经发生的事情的度量。例如,掷骰子得到 6 点的理论概率是完美的 1/6,大约为 16.67%。我可以通过将六面骰子掷一百次并记录得到 6 点的次数来找出实际概率。我可能会记录下 100 次中有 20 次是 6 点。在这种情况下,我的实际概率就是 20%,这与理论概率相差不大。当然,我试验的次数越多,我期望实际概率越接近理论概率。有时这种方法也被称为“蒙特卡罗”方法,以著名的赌场命名。

All the probability we’ve been talking about so far is theoretical probability, that is, mathematically, what ought to happen. There is also practical probability, which is a measure of what has happened. For example, the theoretical probability of getting a 6 when I roll a die is a perfect 1/6, or about 16.67%. I could find the practical probability by rolling a six-sided die hundred times and recording how many times I get a six. I might record 20 sixes out of 100. In that case, my practical probability is 20%, which is not too far from the theoretical probability. Of course, the more trials I do, the closer I would expect the practical probability to get to the theoretical probability. This is sometimes known as the “Monte Carlo” method, after the famous casino.

蒙特卡罗方法确定概率的妙处在于它不涉及任何复杂的数学运算——你只需一遍又一遍地重复测试并记录结果即可。它有时也能给出比理论概率更有用的结果,因为它是对真实事物的衡量。如果存在一些数学运算无法捕捉到的因素(例如,也许你的骰子略微偏向六),或者数学运算太复杂以至于你无法提出理论来描述你的情况,那么蒙特卡罗方法可能就是你所需要的。骑士只需一遍又一遍地掷骰子、计算获胜次数并除以试验次数,就可以轻松找到问题的良好答案。

The great thing about the Monte Carlo method of determining probability is that it doesn’t involve any complex math—you just repeat the test over and over again and record how it comes out. It can sometimes give more useful results than theoretical probability too, because it is a measure of the real thing. If there is some factor that your mathematics didn’t capture (e.g., perhaps your die is slightly weighted toward sixes), or if the math is just so complicated that you can’t come up with a theoretical representation of your case, the Monte Carlo method can be just the thing. The Chevalier could easily have found good answers to his questions by just rolling the dice again and again, counting up wins, and dividing by the number of trials.

在计算机时代,如果您懂得一点编程技巧(或者认识会编程的人——参见规则 10),那么只需几分钟,您就可以轻松模拟数百万次试验。编写游戏模拟程序并获得一些非常有用的概率答案并不难。例如,在《大富翁》游戏中,哪些方格最常被选中?从理论上讲,这几乎是不可能的——但简单的蒙特卡罗模拟可以让您快速回答这个问题,方法是使用计算机掷骰子并将棋子在棋盘上移动几百万次。或者,您可以使用 Joris Dormans 创建的 Machinations 系统,该系统专门用于模拟游戏系统并通过重复模拟显示结果模式。

And here in the computer age, if you know how to do a little bit of programming (or know someone who can—see Rule #10), you can easily simulate millions of trials in just a few minutes. It isn’t too hard to program simulations of games and get some very useful probability answers. For example, in Monopoly, which squares are landed on most frequently? It would be nearly impossible to figure this out theoretically—but a simple Monte Carlo simulation allows you to answer the question quickly by using a computer to roll the dice and move the pieces around the board a few million times. Alternatively, you could make use of the Machinations system created by Joris Dormans, which is specifically designed to model gameplay systems and show patterns of results through repeated simulations.

规则 10:极客喜欢炫耀(贡博定律)

这是所有概率规则中最重要的一条。如果你忘记了其他所有规则,但记住了这条,你就能过得很好。概率中还有许多更难的方面,我们不会在这里讨论——当你遇到它们时,最简单的办法就是找一个自认为是“数学天才”的人。一般来说,这些人很高兴有人真的需要他们的专业知识,他们会竭尽全力帮助你。我曾一次又一次地使用规则 10 来解决困难的游戏设计概率问题。如果你身边没有专家,请在论坛或邮件列表上发布你的问题。如果你真的想得到快速的回复,可以在前面加上“这个问题可能太难了,任何人都无法解决,但我还是想问一下”,因为有很多数学专家喜欢通过解决一个问题来提升自我其他人认为不可能解决的问题。从某种意义上说,你的难题对他们来说就是游戏——为什么不使用游戏设计技巧让它尽可能有吸引力呢?

This is the most important of all the probability rules. If you forget all the others but remember this one, you’ll get by just fine. There are many more difficult aspects of probability that we won’t get into here—when you run into them, the easiest thing to do is to find someone who considers themselves a “math whiz.” Generally, these people are thrilled to have someone actually needing their expertise, and they will bend over backwards to help you. I have used Rule #10 to solve hard game design probability questions again and again. If there aren’t any experts around you, post your question on a forum or mailing list. If you really want a fast response, preface it with “This problem is probably too difficult for anyone to solve, but I thought I would ask anyway,” for there are many math experts who love the ego boost of solving a problem that others think is impossible. In a sense, your hard problem is a game for them—why not use game design techniques to make it as attractive as possible?

您甚至可能在帮您的极客一个忙!我喜欢将规则 #10 称为“贡博定律”,以纪念 Antoine Gombaud,即梅雷骑士,他通过对这一原则的认识,不仅解决了他的赌博问题(无论如何是他的数学问题),而且无意中开创了整个概率论。

You might even be doing your geek a favor! I like to call Rule #10 “Gombaud’s Law,” in honor of Antoine Gombaud, the Chevalier de Méré, who, through his awareness of this principle, not only solved his gambling problem (his mathematical one, anyway), but inadvertently initiated all of probability theory.

您可能害怕执行规则 10,因为您害怕问愚蠢的问题。如果您有这种感觉,请不要忘记帕斯卡和费马欠骑士很多——如果没有他的愚蠢问题,他们永远不会做出一些最伟大的发现。您的愚蠢问题可能会引出一个伟大的真理——但除非您问,否则您永远不会知道。

You might be afraid of exercising Rule #10, because you are afraid of asking stupid questions. If you feel that way, don’t forget that Pascal and Fermat owed the Chevalier a great debt—without his stupid questions, they never would have made some of their greatest discoveries. Your stupid question might lead to a great truth of its own—but you’ll never know unless you ask.

期望值

Expected Value

您将在设计中以多种方式使用概率,但最有用的方法之一是计算预期值。通常,当您在游戏中采取某个动作时,该动作将具有正值或负值。这可能是积分、代币或获得或损失的金钱。游戏中交易的预期值是可能产生的所有值的平均值。

You will use probability in many ways in your designs, but one of the most useful will be to calculate expected value. Very often, when you take an action in a game, the action will have a value, either positive or negative. This might be points, tokens, or money gained or lost. The expected value of a transaction in a game is the average of all the possible values that could result.

例如,棋盘游戏中可能有这样一条规则:当玩家落在绿色区域时,他可以掷一个六面骰子并获得那么多能量点。此事件的期望值是所有可能结果的平均值。为了得到此例中的平均值,由于所有概率都相等,我们可以将所有可能的骰子点数相加,1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21,然后除以 6,得到 3.5。作为游戏设计师,知道每次有人落在绿色区域时,他们平均会获得 3.5 个能量点对您来说非常有用。

For example, there might be a rule in a board game that when a player lands on a green space, he can roll a six-sided die and get that many power points. The expected value of this event is the average of all the possible outcomes. To get the average in this case, since all the probabilities are equal, we can add up all the possible die rolls, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21, and divide by 6, which gives us 3.5. As a game designer, it is very useful for you to know that each time someone lands on a green space, they will, on average, get 3.5 power points.

但并非所有例子都如此简单——有些例子涉及负面结果,有些结果权重不均等。考虑一个玩家掷两个骰子的游戏。如果他们掷出 7 或 11,他们将赢得 5 美元,但如果他们掷出其他任何数字,他们将损失 1 美元。我们如何计算这个游戏的预期价值?

But not all examples are so simple—some involve negative outcomes, and outcomes that aren’t evenly weighted. Consider a game where a player rolls two dice. If they get a 7, or an 11, they win $5, but if they get anything else, they lose $1. How do we figure out the expected value of this game?

掷出 7 的概率是 6/36。

The chance of rolling a 7 is 6/36.

掷出 11 的概率是 2/36。

The chance of rolling an 11 is 2/36.

使用规则 8,掷出其他点数的概率为 1 − 8/36,即 28/36。

Using Rule #8, the chance of rolling anything else is 1 − 8/36, or 28/36.

因此,为了计算预期值,我们将概率乘以每个值,然后将它们全部加起来,如下所示:

So, to calculate the expected value, we multiply the probabilities by the values for each and add them all up, like this:

结果

Outcome

机会 × 结果

Chance × Outcome

价值

Value

7

7

6/36 × 5 美元

6/36 × $5

0.83 美元

$0.83

11

11

2/36 × $5

2/36 × $5

0.28 美元

$0.28

其他一切

Everything else

28/36 × −$1

28/36 × −$1

−0.78美元

−$0.78

期望值

Expected value

 

 

0.33 美元

$0.33

所以,我们认为这是一个好游戏,因为从长远来看,你每次玩平均会赢 33 美分。但是,如果我们改变游戏,只有 7 是赢钱数字,而 11 会让你输掉 1 美元,就像所有其他数字一样,会怎么样?这会改变预期值,如下所示:

So, we see that this is a good game to play, because in the long run, you will, on average, win thirty-three cents each time you play. But, what if we changed the game, so that only 7’s are winning numbers and 11’s make you lose a dollar, just like all the other numbers? This changes the expected value, like this:

结果

Outcome

机会 × 结果

Chance × Outcome

价值

Value

7

7

6/36 × 5 美元

6/36 × $5

0.83 美元

$0.83

其他一切

Everything else

30/36 × −$1

30/36 × −$1

−0.83美元

−$0.83

期望值

Expected value

 

 

$0.00

$0.00

期望值为零意味着从长远来看,这场比赛和抛硬币一样好。胜利和失败是完全平衡的。如果我们再次改变它,让这次只有 11 人获胜,会怎么样?

An expected value of zero means that this game is just as good as flipping a coin in the long run. Wins and losses are completely balanced. What if we change it again, so that this time only eleven wins?

结果

Outcome

机会 × 结果

Chance × Outcome

价值

Value

11

11

2/36 × $5

2/36 × $5

0.28 美元

$0.28

其他一切

Everything else

34/36 × −$1

34/36 × −$1

−0.94美元

−$0.94

期望值

Expected value

 

 

−0.86美元

−$0.86

哎呀!正如您所料,这是一场必输的游戏。平均每次玩这个游戏,您都会输掉大约 86 美分。当然,您可以通过增加获得 11 点的回报,使它成为一场公平的游戏,甚至是一场必赢的游戏。

Ouch! As you might expect, this is a losing game. You’ll lose, on average, about eighty-six cents each time you play it. Of course, you could make it into a fair game, or even a winning game, by increasing the payoff for getting an eleven.

认真考虑价值观

Consider Values Carefully

期望值是游戏平衡的绝佳工具,我们将在下一章中进一步讨论 - 但如果您不小心了解结果的真实价值,它可能会产生误导。

Expected value is an excellent tool for game balancing, which we will discuss more in the next chapter—but if you aren’t careful about what the true value of an outcome is, it can be very misleading.

考虑一下这三种可能属于幻想角色扮演游戏的攻击:

Consider these three attacks that might be part of a fantasy role-playing game:

攻击名称

Attack Name

命中率 (%)

Chance of Hitting (%)

损害

Damage

Wind

100

100

4

4

火球

Fireball

80

80

5

5

闪电

Lightning bolt

20

20

40

40

这些攻击的预期值是多少?风攻击很简单——它总是造成 4 点伤害,因此该攻击的预期值为 4。火球攻击命中率为 80%,未命中率为 20%,因此其预期值为 (5 × 0.8) + (0 × 0.2) = 4 点,与风攻击相同。闪电攻击命中率不高,但命中时会造成巨大伤害。其预期值为 (40 × 0.2) + (0 × 0.8) = 8 点。

What is the expected value of each of these? Wind is easy—it always does exactly 4 damage, so the expected value of that attack is 4. Fireball hits 80% of the time and misses 20% of the time, so it’s expected value is (5 × 0.8) + (0 × 0.2) = 4 points, the same as the wind attack. The lightning bolt attack doesn’t hit very often, but when it does, it packs a wallop. Its expected value is (40 × 0.2) + (0 × 0.8) = 8 points.

现在,基于这些值,人们可能会得出结论,玩家将始终使用闪电攻击,因为平均而言,它的伤害是其他两种攻击的两倍。如果你正在与拥有 500 点生命值的敌人战斗,那么这可能是正确的。但是对于拥有 15 点生命值的敌人呢?大多数玩家在这种情况下不会使用闪电 - 他们会选择更弱但更可靠的攻击。为什么会这样?因为即使闪电可以造成 40 点伤害,但在这种情况下只有 15 点有用 - 闪电对拥有 15 点生命值的敌人的实际预期值为 (0.2 × 15) + (0.8 × 0) = 3 点,低于风和火球攻击。

Now, based on those values, one might conclude that players would always use the lightning bolt attack, since on average it does double the damage of the other two attacks. And if you are fighting an enemy that has 500 hit points, that might be correct. But what about an enemy with 15 hit points? Most players would not use lightning bolt in that case—they would opt for something weaker but surer. Why is this? Because even though the lightning bolt can do 40 damage points, only 15 of them are of any use in that situation—the real expected value of the lightning bolt against an enemy with 15 HP is (0.2 × 15) + (0.8 × 0) = 3 points, which is lower than both the wind and the fireball attack.

你必须始终小心衡量游戏中动作的真实价值。如果某件事给予玩家无法使用的好处,或者包含隐藏的惩罚,你必须在计算中捕捉到这一点。

You must always take care to measure the real values of actions in your game. If something gives a benefit that a player can’t use, or contains a hidden penalty, you must capture that in your calculations.

人为因素

The Human Element

您还必须记住,期望值计算并不能完美地预测人类行为。您可能希望玩家始终选择具有最高期望值的选项,但情况并非总是如此。在某些情况下,这是由于无知造成的 - 因为玩家没有意识到实际的期望值。例如,如果您没有告诉玩家风、火球和闪电的各自概率,而是让他们通过反复试验来发现它们,您可能会发现尝试闪电几次但从未击中的玩家得出的结论是“闪电永远不会击中”,因此期望值为零。玩家对事件发生频率的估计通常是错误的。您必须了解玩家得出的“感知概率”,因为这将决定他们的游戏方式。

You must also keep in mind that expected value calculations do not perfectly predict human behavior. You would expect players to always choose the option with the highest expected value, but that is not always the case. In some cases, this is due to ignorance—because players did not realize the actual expected value. For example, if you didn’t tell players the respective chances of wind, fireball, and lightning bolt, but left it to them to discover them through trial and error, you might find that players who tried lightning bolt several times and never got a hit reached the conclusion that “lightning bolt never hits” and therefore has an expected value of zero. The estimates that players make about how often an event happens are often incorrect. You must be aware of the “perceived probabilities” that players have arrived at, because it will determine how they play.

但有时,即使拥有完美的信息,玩家仍然不会选择期望值最高的选项。两位心理学家卡尼曼和特沃斯基尝试了一个有趣的实验,他们询问了一些受试者他们想玩以下两种游戏中的哪一种:

But sometimes, even with perfect information, players still will not choose an option with the highest expected value. Two psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky, tried an interesting experiment, where they asked a number of subjects which of the two games they would like to play:

  • 游戏A:

    • 赢得 2400 美元的几率为 66%

    • 赢得 2500 美元的机会为 33%

    • 赢得 0 美元的几率为 1%

  • Game A:

    • 66% chance of winning $2400

    • 33% chance of winning $2500

    • 1% chance of winning $0

  • 游戏B:

    • 100% 有机会赢得 2400 美元

  • Game B:

    • 100% chance of winning $2400

这两款游戏都非常棒!但哪一款更好呢?如果你进行预期价值计算

These are both pretty great games to play! But is one better than the other? If you do the expected value calculations

游戏 A 的预期价值:0.66 × 2400 美元 + 0.33 × 2500 美元 + 0.01 × 0 美元 = 2409 美元

Expected Value of Game A: 0.66 × $2400 + 0.33 × $2500 + 0.01 × $0 = $2409

游戏 B 的预期价值:1.00 × 2400 = 2400 美元

Expected Value of Game B: 1.00 × 2400 = $2400

可以看出游戏 A 的期望值更高。但是,他们调查的受试者中只有 18% 选择了游戏 A,而 82% 的人更喜欢玩游戏 B。

You can see that Game A has a higher expected value. But only 18% of the subjects they surveyed picked A, while 82% preferred playing Game B.

为什么?原因是预期价值计算没有捕捉到人类的一个重要因素:后悔。人们不仅会寻找能带来最大快乐的选择,还会避免那些带来最大痛苦的选择。如果你玩了游戏 A(我们假设你只能玩一次),并且不幸获得了 1% 的收益和 0 美元,那感觉会非常糟糕。人们往往愿意付出代价来消除后悔的可能性——用保险推销员的话来说,“买下内心的平静”。他们不仅愿意付出代价来避免后悔,还愿意承担风险。这就是为什么一个输了一点钱的赌徒往往愿意冒更大的风险来试图把钱赢回来。特沃斯基这样说:“当谈到为收益而冒险时,人们是保守的。他们会获得确定的收益,而不是有问题的收益。但我们也发现,当人们面临小的、确定的损失和大的、可能的损失之间的选择时,他们会冒险。”这似乎是“免费”游戏 Puzzle & Dragons 成功的一个重要原因。玩家在穿越地牢时完成一系列谜题并收集宝藏。但有时他们会死在地牢里,游戏会说:“哦,太糟糕了,你快死了。看看你将失去的所有宝藏。你确定不想支付一点点真钱,这样你就有机会保留你赚到的钱吗?”许多人的反应是支付现金,以避免那笔小而确定的损失。

Why? The reason is that the expected value calculation does not capture an important human element: regret. People not only seek out options that create the most pleasure, they also avoid the ones that cause the most pain. If you played Game A (and we’re assuming you only get to play it once), and were unlucky enough to get that 1% and $0, it would feel pretty bad. People are often willing to pay a price to eliminate the potential of regret—“buying peace of mind,” as the insurance salesmen say. Not only are they willing to pay a price to avoid regret, they are willing to take risks. This is why a gambler who has lost a little money is often willing to take more risks to try to get the money back. Tversky puts it this way: “When it comes to taking risks for gains, people are conservative. They will make a sure gain over a problem gain. But we are also finding that when people are faced with a choice between a small, certain loss and a large, probable loss, they will gamble.” This appears to be a large part of the success of the “free-to-play” game Puzzle & Dragons. Players perform a series of puzzles and rack up treasures while making their way through a dungeon. Sometimes, though, they perish in the dungeon, and the game effectively says, “Oh, that’s too bad, you’re dying. Look at all the treasure you are going to lose. Are you sure you don’t want to pay just a little bit of real money, so you have a shot at keeping what you have earned?” And many people respond by paying cash money to avoid that small, certain loss.

在某些情况下,人类思维会将某些风险夸大到完全不成比例。在一项研究中,特沃斯基要求人们估计各种死亡原因的可能性,并获得了以下结果:

In some cases, the human mind inflates some risks completely out of proportion. In one study, Tversky asked people to estimate the likelihood of various causes of death and obtained the following results:

图像

这里特别有趣的是,进行估算的受试者低估了前三类(自然死亡原因),而显著高估了后三类(非自然死亡原因)。这种对现实的扭曲似乎反映了受访者的恐惧。这对游戏设计有什么影响?作为一名设计师,你不仅必须掌握实际的游戏中事件的概率,以及感知概率,由于多种原因,这些概率可能会有很大不同。

What is particularly interesting here is that the subjects making estimates underestimated the top three categories (natural causes of death) and significantly overestimated the bottom three (unnatural causes of death). This distortion of reality seems to be a reflection of the fears of the respondents. What bearing does this have on game design? As a designer, you must have not only a grasp of the actual probabilities of events in your game but also the perceived probabilities, which may be quite different for a number of reasons.

在计算预期值时,你需要同时考虑实际概率和感知概率,它们提供了非常有用的信息,因此构成了镜头#35

You will need to consider both actual and perceived probabilities when calculating expected values, which provide such useful information that they make Lens #35.

技能和机会纠缠在一起

Skill and Chance Get Tangled

尽管概率以及实际值与感知值之间的差异可能很棘手,但游戏机会机制还有更多妙招。尽管我们倾向于认为机会和技能是完全独立的机制,但它们之间存在着我们不能忽视的重要相互作用。以下是游戏设计师需要考虑的五个最重要的技能/机会相互作用。

As tricky as probability and the difference between actual and perceived values might be, the game mechanic of chance has more tricks up its sleeve. As much as we like to think that chance and skill are completely separate mechanics, there are important interactions between them that we cannot ignore. Here are five of the most important skill/chance interactions for a game designer to consider.

  1. 估计概率是一种技能:在许多游戏中,熟练玩家与不熟练玩家之间的区别在于他们预测下一步会发生什么的能力,这通常是通过计算概率来实现的。例如,二十一点游戏几乎完全取决于了解概率。有些玩家甚至练习“算牌”,即跟踪已经打出的牌,因为每打出一张牌都会改变后续牌出现的概率。熟练估计的玩家与不熟练估计的玩家在游戏中感知到的概率可能会有很大差异。

  2. Estimating chance is a skill: In many games, what separates the skilled players from the unskilled is their ability to predict what is going to happen next, often through calculating probabilities. The game of blackjack, for example, is almost entirely about knowing the odds. Some players even practice “card counting,” which is the practice of keeping track of what cards have already been played, since each card played changes the odds of what subsequent cards can appear. The perceived probabilities in your game can vary a great deal between players who are skilled estimators and those who are not.

  3. 技能有成功概率:天真地,人们可能会认为完全基于技能的游戏(如国际象棋或棒球)没有随机性或风险。但从玩家的角度来看,这根本不是事实。每个动作都存在一定程度的风险,玩家不断做出预期价值决策,决定何时谨慎行事,何时冒大风险。这些风险可能难以量化(我成功盗垒或诱捕对手皇后而不被他们注意到的几率有多大?),但它们仍然是风险。在设计游戏时,您需要确保它们是平衡的,就像平衡“纯机会”游戏元素(如抽牌或掷骰子)一样。

  4. Skills have a probability of success: Naively, one might think that completely skill-based games, such as chess or baseball, have no aspects of randomness or risk in them. But from a player’s point of view, this simply isn’t true. Every action has some level of risk, and players are constantly making expected value decisions, deciding when to play it safe and when to take a big risk. These risks can be difficult to quantify (what are the odds that I can successfully steal a base or that I can trap my opponent’s queen without them noticing?), but they are still risks. When designing a game, you need to make sure they are balanced just as you would balance “pure chance” game elements, like drawn cards or die rolls.

  5. 评估对手的技能是一项技能:玩家判断特定行动成功几率的能力很大程度上取决于他们评估对手技能的能力。许多游戏的迷人之处在于试图欺骗对手,让对手认为你的技能比实际更强,以防止她尝试任何过于大胆的行为,并使她对自己产生不确定性。同样,有时情况恰恰相反——在某些游戏中,让玩家认为你的技能比实际更差是一个好策略,这样你的对手就不会注意到你的微妙策略,也许会尝试对付技术娴熟的玩家时会冒险的行动。

  6. Estimating an opponent’s skill is a skill: A big part of a player’s ability to determine the chances of success for a particular action rests on their ability to estimate their opponent’s skill. A fascinating part of many games is trying to fool your opponent into thinking your skills are greater than they are, to prevent her from trying anything too bold and to make her uncertain of herself. Likewise, sometimes the opposite is true—in some games, it is a good strategy to make a player think your skills are less than they really are, so that your opponent will not notice your subtle strategies and will perhaps try actions that would be risky against a skilled player.

  7. 预测纯粹的机会是一种想象出来的技能:人类有意识和无意识地寻找模式,以帮助预测接下来会发生什么。我们对模式的狂热常常导致我们在没有模式的地方寻找和发现模式。最常见的两种错误模式是“幸运连胜谬误”(我已经连续赢了好几次,因此很可能再次赢)及其相反的“赌徒谬误”(我已经输了好几次,所以我一定赢了)。人们很容易嘲笑这些是无知的,但在玩家最重要的头脑中,检测这些虚假模式感觉就像是在锻炼真正的技能,作为一名设计师,你应该找到利用它为自己谋利的方法。

  8. Predicting pure chance is an imagined skill: Humans look for patterns, consciously and subconsciously, to help predict what is going to happen next. Our mania for patterns often leads us to look for and find patterns where none exist. Two of the most common false patterns are the “lucky streak fallacy” (I’ve had several wins in a row, and therefore another is likely) and, its opposite, the “gambler’s fallacy” (I’ve had several losses, so I must be due for a win). It is easy to scoff at these as ignorant, but in the all-important mind of the player, detecting these bogus patterns feels like the exercise of a real skill, and as a designer, you should find ways to use that to your advantage.

  9. 控制纯粹的机会是一种想象出来的技能:我们的大脑不仅积极地寻找模式,而且还积极地、拼命地寻找因果关系。纯粹的机会无法控制结果——但这并不能阻止人们以某种​​方式掷骰子、携带幸运符或参与其他迷信仪式。这种可能控制命运的感觉是赌博游戏如此令人兴奋的原因之一。理智上,我们知道这是不可能的,但当你在那里掷骰子,说“来吧,来吧……”时,你肯定会觉得这是可能的,尤其是当你走运的时候!如果你尝试玩纯粹的机会游戏,但完全不相信你的所想或所为会影响结果,很多乐趣就会突然消失。我们试图控制命运的自然倾向会让机会游戏感觉像是技巧游戏。

  10. Controlling pure chance is an imagined skill: Not only do our brains actively seek patterns, but they also actively and desperately seek cause-and-effect relationships. With pure chance, there is no way to control the outcome—but that doesn’t stop people from rolling the dice a certain way, carrying lucky charms, or engaging in other superstitious rituals. This feeling that it might be possible to control fate is part of what makes gambling games so exciting. Intellectually, we know it isn’t possible, but when you are up there rolling the dice, saying “come on, come on…,” it certainly feels like it might be possible, especially when you get lucky! If you try playing games of pure chance, but completely disengage yourself from the idea that anything you think or do can influence the outcome, much of the fun suddenly drains away. Our natural tendency to try to control fate can make games of chance feel like games of skill.

机会是棘手的东西,因为它交织着复杂的数学、人类心理学和所有基本的游戏机制。但正是这种棘手性赋予了游戏丰富性、复杂性和深度。我们七种基本游戏机制中的最后一个为我们提供了镜头 #36

Chance is tricky stuff, because it intertwines hard math, human psychology, and all of the basic game mechanics. But this trickiness is what gives games their richness, complexity, and depth. The last of our seven basic game mechanics gives us Lens #36.

终于,我们讲完了所有 7 个基本游戏机制。很快,我们将转向基于这些机制构建的更高级机制,例如谜题和交互式故事结构。但首先,我们需要探索平衡这些基本元素的方法。

At long last, we have made it through all seven of the basic game mechanics. Soon, we will move onto more advanced mechanics that are built from these, such as puzzles and interactive story structures. But first, we need to explore methods of bringing these basic elements into balance.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 游戏机制:高级游戏设计,作者 Ernest Adams 和 Joris Dormans。本书深入探讨了各种游戏机制之间相互作用的大量细节,并介绍了用于模拟游戏设计的迷人 Machinations 系统。

  • Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans. This book gets into a lot of wonderfully nitty-gritty details about the interactions of various game mechanics and gives an introduction to the fascinating Machinations system for simulating your game design.

  • 大卫·帕莱特 (David Parlett) 著的《牛津棋盘游戏书》。包含有关帕莱特规则分析的更多详细信息,以及对前几个世纪一些令人惊叹但鲜为人知的棋盘游戏的描述。

  • The Oxford Book of Board Games by David Parlett. Contains more details on Parlett’s Rule Analysis, as well as descriptions of some amazing but little-known board games from previous centuries.

  • 格雷格·科斯蒂基安 (Greg Costikyan) 著《游戏中的不确定性》。这是一本关于游戏中机会和不确定性本质的极具洞察力的书。我每次阅读它都会有新的收获。

  • Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan. An incredibly insightful book about the nature of chance and uncertainty in games. I get something new from it every time I read it.

  • 《未完成的游戏:帕斯卡、费马和使世界现代化的未完成的信件》作者:基思·德夫林。如果你想知道概率诞生的更多细节,这是一本权威的书。

  • The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Unfinished Letter that Made the World Modern by Keith Devlin. If you want even more details of the story of how probability came to be, this is the definitive book.

第十三

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

游戏机制必须平衡

Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance



13.1

FIGURE

13.1

虚假的天平是上帝所憎恶的。

—箴言 11:1

A false balance is an abomination to the Lord.

—Proverbs 11:1

你是否曾经期待玩一款你确信会非常有趣的游戏,但却大失所望?这款游戏的故事听起来很有趣,有你最喜欢的游戏动作、尖端技术和精美的艺术作品——但不知何故,玩起来却很单调、令人困惑和沮丧。这是一款不平衡的游戏。

Have you ever looked forward to playing a game that you were certain was going to be incredibly fun, only to be terribly disappointed? This game had a story that sounded interesting, the kind of gameplay action that is your favorite, cutting-edge technology, and beautiful artwork—but somehow the play was monotonous, confusing, and frustrating. This is a game that is out of balance.

对于新手设计师来说,平衡游戏似乎是一件非常神秘的事情——但实际上,平衡游戏无非就是调整游戏元素,直到它们提供您想要的体验。平衡游戏远非一门科学;事实上,尽管平衡游戏通常涉及简单的数学运算,但它通常被认为是游戏设计中最有艺术性的部分,因为它涉及理解游戏元素之间关系的细微差别,并知道要改变哪些元素、改变多少以及哪些元素保持不变。

To novice designers, the business of balancing a game seems quite mysterious—but really, balancing a game is nothing more than adjusting the elements of the game until they deliver the experience you want. Balancing a game is far from a science; in fact, despite the simple mathematics that is often involved, it is generally considered the most artful part of game design, for it is all about understanding subtle nuances in the relationships between the elements of your game and knowing which ones to alter, how much to alter them, and which ones to leave alone.

游戏平衡之所以如此困难,部分原因在于没有两款游戏是相同的,每款游戏都有许多不同的因素需要平衡。作为一名设计师,你必须辨别游戏中哪些元素需要平衡,然后尝试改变它们,直到它们产生你想要玩家拥有的体验。

Part of what makes game balancing so difficult is that no two games are alike and every game has many different factors that need to be in balance. As a designer, you must discern what elements in your game need to be balanced and then experiment with changing them until you have them generating exactly the experience you want your players to have.

把它想象成创造一种新食谱——确定你需要的配料是一回事,但决定每种配料的用量以及如何搭配又是另一回事。你做出的一些决定将基于复杂的数学运算(1.5 茶匙泡打粉可使 1 杯面粉发酵),但其他决定,例如使用多少糖,通常取决于个人口味。一位熟练的厨师可以让最简单的食谱变得美味可口,就像一位熟练的游戏设计师可以让最简单的游戏变得有趣一样——他们都知道如何平衡配料。

Think of it like creating a new recipe—it is one thing to determine the ingredients you need, but another is to decide how much of each to use and how they should be combined. Some of the decisions you make will be based on hard mathematics (1.5 teaspoons of baking powder leavens 1 cup of flour), but others, like how much sugar to use, are often a matter of personal taste. A skilled chef can make the simplest of recipes a delight to eat for the same reason a skilled game designer can make the simplest of games a delight to play—they both know how to balance the ingredients.

游戏平衡可以有多种形式,因为每个不同的游戏都有不同的平衡点。不过,有些平衡模式会反复出现。平衡游戏的关键在于仔细检查,因此本章将包含许多视角。

Game balancing can come in a variety of forms, because every different game has different things that must be brought into balance. Still, there are some patterns of balance that occur over and over again. Balancing a game is all about examining it carefully, so this chapter will be rich with many lenses.

十二种最常见的游戏平衡类型

The Twelve Most Common Types of Game Balance

平衡类型#1:公平

Balance Type #1: Fairness

实力悬殊的战斗毫无乐趣可言。

— 加富尔夫人

There is no joy in an unequal battle.

—Mrs. Cavour
对称游戏

玩家在游戏中普遍追求的一个品质就是公平。玩家希望感觉到,与他们作对的势力没有优势,无法击败他们。确保公平最简单的方法之一就是让游戏对称,即为所有玩家提供平等的资源和权力。大多数传统棋盘游戏(如跳棋、国际象棋和大富翁)和几乎所有运动都使用这种方法来确保没有玩家比其他玩家拥有不公平的优势。如果你想让玩家直接竞争,并且你希望他们的技能水平大致相同,那么对称游戏是一个不错的选择。它们是确定哪些玩家最优秀的特别好的系统,因为游戏中的所有东西都是平等的,除了个人玩家为游戏带来的技能和策略。在这些游戏中,完美的对称并不总是可能的,因为经常会有一些小问题,比如“谁先走?”或“谁先拿球?”,让一方比另一方略有优势。通常,随机选择,如抛硬币或掷骰子,是解决方案。虽然这会让一名玩家获得一点优势,但在很多游戏中,这种优势是平均分配的。在某些情况下,弥补这种不对称的方法是让技能最少的玩家获得优势——例如“最年轻的玩家先走”。这是一种巧妙的方法,可以利用游戏的自然不平衡来帮助平衡玩家的技能水平。

One quality that players universally seek in games is fairness. Players want to feel that the forces working against them do not have an advantage that will make them impossible to defeat. One of the simplest ways to ensure this is to make your game symmetrical, that is, to give equal resources and powers to all players. Most traditional board games (such as checkers, chess, and Monopoly) and almost all sports use this method to be sure that no player has an unfair advantage over another. If you want to put players in direct competition with each other and you expect them to have roughly equal levels of skill, symmetrical games are a great choice. They are particularly good systems for determining which players are the best, since all things in the game are equal but for the skill and strategy that the individual players bring to the game. In these games, perfect symmetry is not always possible as there is often some minor issue such as “who goes first?” or “who starts with the ball?” that gives one side a small advantage over the other. Generally, random selection, such as a coin toss or die roll, is the solution. Though it gives one player a small advantage, over many games, the advantage is distributed evenly. In some cases, the way this asymmetry is remedied is by giving the advantage to the player with the least skill—such as “youngest player goes first.” This is an elegant way to use the natural imbalance of the game to help balance the skill levels of the players.

非对称游戏

为对手提供不同的资源和能力也是可能的,而且通常是可取的。如果你这样做,请注意,你面前有一项重要的平衡任务!以下是你可能创建不对称游戏的一些原因:

It is also possible, and often desirable, to give opponents different resources and abilities. If you do, be aware that you have a significant balancing task ahead of you! Here are some of the reasons you might create an asymmetrical game:

  1. 模拟现实世界的情况:如果您的游戏目的是模拟第二次世界大战期间轴心国和同盟国之间的战斗,那么对称游戏是没有意义的,因为现实世界的冲突并不对称。

  2. To simulate a real-world situation: If the point of your game is to simulate the battle between Axis and Allied forces during World War II, a symmetrical game does not make sense, since the real-world conflict was not symmetrical.

  3. 为玩家提供另一种探索游戏空间的方式:探索是游戏的一大乐趣。玩家通常喜欢探索使用不同力量和资源玩同一款游戏的可能性。例如,在格斗游戏中,如果两个玩家有十个不同的战士可供选择,每个战士都有不同的力量,那么就有十乘十种不同的配对,每种配对都需要不同的策略,这样你就把一场游戏变成了一百场游戏。

  4. To give players another way to explore the game space: Exploration is one of the great pleasures of gameplay. Players often enjoy exploring the possibilities of playing the same game with different powers and resources. In a fighting game, for example, if two players have ten different fighters to choose from, each with different powers, there are ten times ten different pairings, each of which requires different strategies, and effectively you have turned one game into one hundred games.

  5. 个性化:不同的玩家为游戏带来不同的技能——如果你让玩家选择最符合他们自身技能的力量和资源,他们就会感到自己很强大——他们能够塑造游戏来强调他们喜欢的游戏方式。

  6. Personalization: Different players bring different skills to a game—if you give the players a choice of powers and resources that best match their own skills, it makes them feel powerful—they have been able to shape the game to emphasize the way they like to play.

  7. 公平竞争:有时,你的对手的技术水平截然不同。如果你的对手是计算机,情况尤其如此控制。想想吃豆人 (Pac-Man)游戏。如果只有一个鬼魂追赶吃豆人 (Pac-Man)而不是四个,游戏会更加对称。但如果是这样的话,玩家会轻松获胜,因为在迷宫导航方面,人类可以轻松战胜计算机。但同时战胜四个计算机控制的对手会使游戏恢复平衡,也让计算机有公平的机会击败玩家。有些游戏在这方面是可定制的 - 例如,高尔夫让分赛让不同级别的玩家在他们都喜欢的挑战级别上竞争。是否引入这种平衡取决于你的游戏是旨在衡量玩家技能的标准,还是目标是为所有玩家提供挑战。

  8. To level the playing field: Sometimes, your opponents have radically different skill levels. This is especially true if you have opponents that are computer controlled. Consider the game of Pac-Man. It would be more symmetrical if there were just one ghost chasing Pac-Man, not four. But if that was the case, the player would win easily for a human can easily outwit a computer when it comes to navigating a maze. But to outwit four computer-controlled opponents at once brings the game into balance and gives the computer a fair chance of defeating the player. Some games are customizable in this regard—a golf handicap, for instance, lets players of different levels compete at the challenge levels they will both enjoy. Whether to introduce this kind of balancing depends on whether your game is meant to be a standard measure of player’s skill or whether the goal is to provide challenge to all players.

  9. 创造有趣的情境:在可以创造的所有游戏的无限空间中,不对称游戏比对称游戏多得多。让不对称的力量相互对抗通常会让玩家感到有趣和发人深省,因为赢得游戏的正确策略并不总是显而易见的。玩家自然会好奇一方或另一方是否有优势,他们通常会花费大量时间和精力来决定游戏是否真正公平。Bhag -Chal游戏(尼泊尔的官方棋盘游戏)就是一个很好的例子。在这个游戏中,玩家不仅拥有不平等的力量,而且他们还有不同的目标!一个玩家控制五只老虎,而另一个玩家控制二十只山羊。老虎玩家通过吃掉五只山羊获胜,山羊玩家通过放置山羊使老虎无法移动而获胜。虽然经验丰富的玩家通常认为游戏是平衡的,但游戏新手会花费大量时间讨论一方或另一方是否具有特别的优势,并一遍又一遍地玩游戏,试图确定最佳策略和反策略。

  10. To create interesting situations: In the infinite space of all the games that can be created, many more of them are asymmetrical than are symmetrical. Pitting asymmetrical forces against each other can often be interesting and thought provoking for the players, since it is not always obvious what the right strategies will be to win the game. Players become naturally curious about whether one side or another has an advantage, and they will often spend a great deal of time and thought to try to decide whether the game is truly fair. The game of Bhag-Chal (the official board game of Nepal) is an excellent example of this. In this game, not only do the players have unequal forces, they also have different goals! One player controls five tigers, while the other controls twenty goats. The tiger player wins by eating five goats, and the goat player wins by positioning the goats so that no tiger can move. Though it is generally acknowledged by experienced players that the game is balanced, novices to the game spend a great deal of time discussing whether one side or the other has particular advantage and playing the game over and over trying to determine the best strategies and counter strategies.

在非对称游戏中,适当调整资源和权力以使其感觉势均力敌可能相当困难。最常见的方法是为每种资源或权力分配一个值,并确保双方的值总和相等。请参阅以下部分的示例。

It can be quite difficult to properly adjust the resources and powers in an asymmetrical game to make them feel evenly matched. The most common method of doing so is to assign a value to each resource or power and make sure that the sum of the values is equal for both sides. See the following section for an example.

双翼机战斗

想象一场双翼机空战游戏。每位玩家可以选择以下飞机之一:

Imagine a game of biplane dogfight combat. Each player gets to choose one of the following planes:

飞机

Plane

速度

Speed

机动性

Maneuverability

火力

Firepower

食人鱼

Piranha

中等的

Medium

中等的

Medium

中等的

Medium

复仇者

Revenger

高的

High

高的

High

低的

Low

索普威斯骆驼

Sopwith Camel

低的

Low

低的

Low

中等的

Medium

这些飞机是否同样平衡?很难说。不过,乍一看,我们可能会将这三个类别评估为低 = 1、中 = 2、高 = 3。这给了我们新的信息:

Are these planes equally balanced? It is hard to say. At first glance, though, we might evaluate all three categories as low = 1, medium = 2, and high = 3. This gives us new information:

飞机

Plane

速度

Speed

机动性

Maneuverability

火力

Firepower

总计

Totals

食人鱼

Piranha

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

6

6

复仇者

Revenger

高 (3)

High (3)

高 (3)

High (3)

低 (1)

Low (1)

7

7

索普威斯骆驼

Sopwith Camel

低 (1)

Low (1)

低 (1)

Low (1)

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

4

4

从这个角度来看,拥有 Revenger 的玩家似乎比其他玩家拥有不公平的优势。情况可能确实如此。但在玩了一会儿游戏之后,我们可能会注意到 Piranha 和 Revenger 似乎势均力敌,但驾驶 Sopwith Camel 的玩家通常会输。这可能让我们推测火力比其他类别更有价值——可能是其他类别的两倍。换句话说,对于火力列,低 = 2,中 = 4,高 = 6。这给了我们一个新表格:

Looked at from this point of view, the player with the Revenger seems to have an unfair advantage over the others. And that may be the case. But after playing the game a little, maybe we notice that the Piranha and the Revenger seem evenly matched but players who fly the Sopwith Camel generally lose. This might lead us to speculate that Firepower is more valuable than the other categories—maybe twice as valuable. In other words, for the Firepower column, low = 2, medium = 4, and high = 6. This gives us a new table:

飞机

Plane

速度

Speed

机动性

Maneuverability

火力

Firepower

总计

Totals

食人鱼

Piranha

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

中型 (4)

Medium (4)

8

8

复仇者

Revenger

高 (3)

High (3)

高 (3)

High (3)

低 (2)

Low (2)

8

8

索普威斯骆驼

Sopwith Camel

低 (1)

Low (1)

低 (1)

Low (1)

中型 (4)

Medium (4)

6

6

这样,我们就能得出与游戏实际表现相符的总数。现在,我们可能有一个模型可以告诉我们如何平衡游戏,让游戏更加公平。为了测试我们的理论,我们可能会将索普威斯骆驼式战斗机的火力改为高 (6),这样我们就得到了一张新表格:

This gives us totals that match our observation of the game in action. We may now have a model that shows us how to balance the game to make it fair. To test our theory, we might change the Firepower for the Sopwith Camel to be high (6), giving us a new table:

飞机

Plane

速度

Speed

机动性

Maneuverability

火力

Firepower

总计

Totals

食人鱼

Piranha

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

中型 (2)

Medium (2)

中型 (4)

Medium (4)

8

8

复仇者

Revenger

高 (3)

High (3)

高 (3)

High (3)

低 (2)

Low (2)

8

8

索普威斯骆驼

Sopwith Camel

低 (1)

Low (1)

低 (1)

Low (1)

高 (6)

High (6)

8

8

如果我们的模型是正确的,那么这三架飞机似乎同样平衡。但这只是一种理论。我们通过测试游戏来找出答案。如果我们玩游戏并确定无论使用哪种飞机,游戏玩起来感觉都大致公平,那么我们的模型就是正确的。但是如果我们玩游戏并发现索普威斯骆驼仍然在战斗中失败怎么办?在这种情况下,我们将不得不做出新的推测,改变我们的模型,重新平衡,然后再次尝试玩游戏。

It would appear that if our model is correct, these three planes are equally balanced. But that’s only a theory. The way we find out is by playtesting the game. If we play and determine that gameplay feels roughly fair no matter which plane you use, then our model is correct. But what if we play and realize that the Sopwith Camel is still losing battles? In that case, we will have to make a new speculation, change our model, rebalance, and try playing again.

值得注意的是,平衡行为和开发平衡模型是相辅相成的。在平衡过程中,你会更多地了解游戏中的关系,并可以创建一个更好的数学模型来表示这些关系。当你改变模型时,你会更多地了解平衡游戏的正确方法。模型决定平衡,平衡决定模型。

It is important to note that the act of balancing and developing a model of how to balance go hand in hand. As you balance, you learn more about relationships in the game, and you can make a better mathematical model that represents these relationships. And as you change the model, you learn more about the right way to balance your game. The model informs the balance, and the balancing informs the model.

还要注意,游戏平衡只有在游戏可玩后才能真正开始。许多游戏在市场上遭遇失败,因为计划中的所有时间都用在了让游戏运行上,而没有足够的时间在游戏上市前平衡游戏。有一条古老的经验法则是,在拥有一个完全可运行的版本后,需要六个月的时间来平衡游戏,但这会根据游戏的类型和范围而有很大差异。我个人使用的规则是,一半的开发时间应该花在平衡游戏上。当然,你拥有的新游戏元素越多,平衡游戏所需的时间就越长。

Also note that balancing a game can only really begin once the game is playable. Many a game has suffered in the marketplace because all the time in the schedule got used up just getting the game to work, and not enough time was allotted to balance the game before it needed to go to market. There is an old rule of thumb that it takes six months to balance your game after you have a completely working version, but this varies a great deal depending on the type and scope of your game. The rule I personally use is that half the development time should be spent balancing the game. Certainly, the more new gameplay elements you have, the longer it will take you to balance it properly.

剪刀石头布

平衡元素以实现公平的一个简单方法是确保游戏中的某样东西比其他东西更有优势时,另一样东西也比它更有优势!这通常被称为“循环平衡”,其中最典型的例子是石头、剪刀、布游戏,

One simple way to balance elements for fairness is to make sure that whenever something in your game has an advantage over something else, yet another thing has an advantage over that! Often referred to as “circular balance,” the iconic example of this is the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors where

  • 石头折断剪刀

  • Rock breaks scissors

  • 剪刀剪纸

  • Scissors cut paper

  • 纸包石头

  • Paper covers rock

没有哪个元素是至高无上的,因为总有另一个可以打败它。这是一种确保每个游戏元素都有优点和缺点的简单方法。格斗游戏尤其喜欢使用这种技术,以确保玩家选择的战士都不是不可战胜的。

None of the elements can be supreme, because there is always another that can defeat it. It is a simple way to ensure that every game element has both strengths and weaknesses. Fighting games particularly like to use this technique to help ensure none of the warriors a player might choose are undefeatable.

平衡游戏以使其感觉公平是最基本的游戏平衡类型之一。您一定会希望在您创建的任何游戏中使用公平镜头。

Balancing your game to make it feel fair is one of the most fundamental types of game balancing. You will surely want to use the Lens of Fairness on any game you create.

平衡类型#2:挑战与成功

Balance Type #2: Challenge vs. Success

让我们重新回顾一下第 10 章玩家的心态中的这张图表。

Let us revisit this diagram from Chapter 10: Player’s Mind.



13.2

FIGURE

13.2

我们知道让玩家保持心流是可取的。如果游戏太具挑战性,玩家就会感到沮丧。但如果玩家太容易成功,他们就会感到无聊。让玩家保持中间路线意味着保持挑战和成功的体验保持适当的平衡。这可能特别困难,因为玩家可能拥有不同的技能水平。一个玩家觉得无聊的东西,另一个玩家可能会觉得有挑战性,而另一个玩家可能会觉得沮丧。实现适当平衡的一些常见技巧包括:

We know that keeping the player in the flow channel is desirable. If play is too challenging, the player becomes frustrated. But if the player succeeds too easily, they can become bored. Keeping the player on the middle path means keeping the experiences of challenge and success in proper balance. This can be particularly difficult since players may have all different levels of skill. What one player finds boring, another may find challenging, and yet another may find frustrating. Some common techniques for striking a proper balance include the following:

  • 每次成功后难度都会增加:这是电子游戏中非常常见的模式——每个级别都比上一个级别难。玩家不断提高技能,直到他们能够完成一个级别,然后又会面临一个挑战。当然,不要忘记使用前面显示的时态和释放模式。

  • Increase difficulty with each success: This is a very common pattern in videogames—each level is harder than the last. Players build their skill until they can complete a level, only to be presented with one that challenges them yet again. Don’t forget, of course, to use the tense and release pattern shown earlier.

  • 让玩家快速通过简单部分:假设您的游戏有某种逐渐增加难度的方法,那么如果熟练的玩家可以轻松掌握游戏,那么您可以让熟练的玩家快速完成关卡,这对您自己也有好处。这样,熟练的玩家将快速通过简单关卡,快速进入对他们更有趣的挑战,而技能较差的玩家则会受到早期关卡的挑战。这让每个玩家都能快速进入游戏中具有挑战性的部分。如果您以不同的方式安排游戏,让每个关卡都需要一个小时才能玩完,无论技能水平如何,熟练的玩家可能会很快因为缺乏挑战而感到无聊。

  • Let players get through easy parts fast: Assuming your game has some method of gradually increasing the difficulty, you do yourself a service by allowing skilled players to finish a level quickly if they can easily master it. This way, skilled players will blow through easy levels, quickly getting to a challenge that is more interesting to them, while less skilled players will be challenged by the early levels. This lets every player quickly get to the part of the game that is a challenge. If you arrange it differently, such that each level takes one hour to play, regardless of skill level, skilled players may quickly grow bored from lack of challenge.

  • 创造“挑战层”:游戏中一种流行的模式是在每个关卡或任务结束时给出一个等级或一定数量的星星。如果你得到“D”或“F”,你必须重打这个关卡,但如果你得到“C”或更好的分数,你可以继续。这为游戏的玩法创造了很大的灵活性。新手玩家很高兴得到“C”并解锁下一个关卡。随着他们积累经验并解锁所有关卡,他们可能会给自己设定一个新的挑战——在之前的关卡上获得“A”(甚至“A+”!)。

  • Create “layers of challenge”: A popular pattern in games is to give a grade, or some number of stars, at the end of each level or mission. If you get a “D” or “F,” you must repeat the level, but if you get a “C” or better, you can continue. This creates a situation with a lot of flexibility in how you can play it. Novice players are thrilled to get a “C” and unlock the next level. As they gain experience and have unlocked all the levels, they may set themselves a new challenge—to earn an “A” (or even “A+”!) on earlier levels.

  • 让玩家选择难度等级:一种行之有效的方法是让玩家选择“简单、中等或困难”模式。有些游戏(例如,许多 Atari 2600 游戏)甚至允许您在游戏中期更改难度等级。这样做的好处是玩家可以快速找到适合其技能水平的挑战等级。缺点是您必须创建和平衡多个版本的游戏。此外,这可能会削弱游戏的“真实性”——玩家会争论哪个版本是“真实”的,或者不确定其中是否有哪个版本是“真实的”。

  • Let players choose the difficulty level: A tried and true method is to let players choose to play on “easy, medium, or hard” modes. Some games (e.g., many Atari 2600 games) even let you change the difficulty-level midgame. The upside of this is that players can quickly find the appropriate challenge level for their skill level. The downside is that you have to create and balance multiple versions of your game. Also, it can detract from the “reality” of your game—players will argue over which version is the “real” one or be left feeling unsure whether any of them are “real.”

  • 与各种玩家一起进行游戏测试:许多设计师陷入了只与经常接触游戏的人一起测试的陷阱,最终设计出的游戏对于新手来说太令人沮丧了。其他人则陷入了相反的陷阱,只与从未玩过游戏的人一起测试他们的游戏。他们最终设计出的游戏让经验丰富的玩家很快就会厌倦。明智的设计师会与熟练玩家和新手玩家一起进行游戏测试,以确保他们的游戏一开始很有趣,一段时间后很有趣,并且以后会很有趣。

  • Playtest with a variety of players: Many designers fall into a trap of only testing with people who are constantly exposed to the game and end up designing a game that is too frustrating for novices. Others fall into the opposite trap and only test their game with people who have never played before. They end up designing a game that experienced players quickly grow bored with. Wise designers playtest with a mix of skilled and novice players, to be sure that their game is fun at first, fun after a while, and fun much, much later.

  • 给失败者一个机会《马里奥赛车》以其独特的道具发放系统而闻名。在比赛中领先的玩家会得到少量道具,而落后较多的玩家则会得到好道具,从而领先。这个系统对这款游戏来说很棒,因为它让人感觉更公平,并且让每个人都参与其中:落后的玩家需要集中注意力,因为随时都有可能出现改变游戏规则的道具,而领先的玩家也不能满足于现状,因为“蓝色炮弹”随时可能击中他们。这个巧妙的系统可以很好地将所有玩家推向流通道的中心。

  • Give the losers a break: Mario Kart is famous for its unusual system of giving out power-ups. Players who are ahead in the race get meager power-ups, while players who are far behind get the good stuff, allowing them to race ahead. This is a great system for that game because it feels more fair and keeps everyone engaged: players who are behind need to pay attention because a game-changing power-up could come at any second, and players who are ahead cannot afford to rest on their laurels because that “blue shell” could hit them at any time. This tricky system does a great job at nudging all players to the center of the flow channel.

游戏平衡中最艰难的挑战之一是决定游戏随着时间的推移应该变得多难。许多设计师非常担心玩家太容易通关,因此他们将后面的关卡设计得非常难以取胜,最终 90% 的玩家会沮丧地放弃游戏。这些设计师希望增加挑战性可以延长游戏时间——这是有道理的——如果你花了 40 个小时才通过第九关,你可能会愿意非常努力地通过第十关。但事实上,有太多的竞争游戏可以玩,许多玩家会沮丧地放弃。另一方面,对于免费游戏来说,这种游戏后期的挫败感可能正是你想要的,可以刺激玩家付费并完成游戏。作为一名设计师,问问自己“我希望有多少比例的玩家能够完成这款游戏?”,然后为此进行设计,这是很有意义的。

One of the toughest challenges in game balancing is deciding how difficult the game should get over time. Many designers are so afraid of players beating their game too easily that they make later levels so fiendishly difficult to win that 90% of players eventually give up on the game in frustration. These designers hope that the increased challenge will extend the play time—and there is something to that—if you have expended forty hours to get through level nine, you will probably be willing to work pretty hard to defeat level ten. But in truth, there are so many competing games to play that many players just give up in frustration. On the other hand, with a free to play game, this late-game frustration might be just what you want, to spur players to pay money and move toward completion. As a designer, it makes sense to ask yourself, “What percentage of players do I want to be able to complete this game?” and then design for that.

别忘了:学习玩游戏本身就是一项挑战!因此,游戏的第一或第二关通常非常简单——玩家在尝试理解“控制和目标”时就已经面临了极大的挑战,任何额外的挑战都可能让他们陷入沮丧。更不用说,一些早期的成功可以大大增强玩家的信心——自信的玩家不会轻易放弃游戏。

And don’t forget: just learning to play a game at all is a challenge! For this reason, the first level or two of a game is often incredibly simplistic—the player is so challenged just trying to understand the “controls and goals” that any additional challenge might push them right into frustration. Not to mention the fact that a few early successes can do a lot to build a player’s confidence—a confident player will give up less easily on a game.

挑战是游戏玩法的核心元素,并且很难平衡,因此值得单独审视。

Challenge is a core element of gameplay and can be so difficult to balance that it merits its own lens.

平衡类型#3:有意义的选择

Balance Type #3: Meaningful Choices

在游戏中,给玩家提供选择的方式有很多种。对玩家来说有意义的选择会让他们问自己一些问题,例如:

There are many different ways to give a player choices in a game. Meaningful choices for a player lead them to ask themselves questions, such as the following:

  • 我应该去哪儿?

  • Where should I go?

  • 我该如何花费我的资源?

  • How should I spend my resources?

  • 我应该练习什么并努力完善什么?

  • What should I practice and try to perfect?

  • 我应该如何装扮我的角色?

  • How should I dress my character?

  • 我应该快速还是小心地完成游戏?

  • Should I try to get through the game quickly or carefully?

  • 我应该注重进攻还是防守?

  • Should I focus on offense or defense?

  • 在这种情况下我应该采取什么策略?

  • What strategy should I use in this situation?

  • 我该选择哪一种力量?

  • Which power should I choose?

  • 我该谨慎行事还是冒大风险?

  • Should I play it safe or take a big risk?

好的游戏会为玩家提供有意义的选择。这些选择不会是随便的,而是会对接下来发生的事情和游戏结果产生真正影响的选择。许多设计师都陷入了为玩家提供无意义选择的陷阱;例如,在赛车游戏中,您可能有 50 辆车可供选择,但如果它们都以相同的方式驾驶,那就等于根本没有选择。其他设计师陷入了另一个陷阱——提供没人想要的选择。您可能会为士兵提供十把枪,每把枪都不同,但如果其中一把枪明显比其他枪好,那就等于根本没有选择。

A good game gives the player meaningful choices. Not just any choices but choices that will have a real impact on what happens next and how the game turns out. Many designers fall into the trap of offering the player meaningless choices; for example, in a racing game, you might have 50 vehicles to choose from, but if they all drive the same way, it is like having no choice at all. Other designers fall into a different trap—offering choices that no one would want. You might offer a soldier ten guns, all different, but if one of them is clearly better than the rest, again it is like having no choice at all.

如果玩家面临多种选择,但其中一种选择明显优于其他,则这种选择被称为主导策略。一旦发现主导策略,游戏就不再有趣,因为游戏谜题已被解决 — — 不再需要做出选择。如果发现自己正在开发的游戏具有主导策略,则必须更改规则(平衡事物),以使该策略不再占主导地位,并恢复游戏中有意义的选择。先前的双翼机战斗示例就是这样的一个例子 — — 设计师试图平衡游戏以消除主导策略并恢复玩家有意义的选择。玩家发现的隐藏主导策略通常被称为“漏洞”,因为玩家可以利用它们走上设计师从未想过的成功捷径。

When choices are offered to a player, but one of them is clearly better than the rest, this is called a dominant strategy. Once a dominant strategy is discovered, the game is no longer fun, because the puzzle of the game has been solved—there are no more choices to make. When you discover that a game you are working on has a dominant strategy, you must change the rules (balance things) so that this strategy no longer dominates and meaningful choice can be restored to the game. The previous Biplane Battle example is an example of just that—a designer trying to balance a game to remove a dominant strategy and restore meaningful choice to the players. Hidden dominant strategies that are discovered by players are often referred to as “exploits,” since they can be exploited by players to take a shortcut to success that the designer never intended.

在游戏开发初期,主导策略比比皆是。随着游戏的持续开发,这些策略开始得到适当的平衡。矛盾的是,这常常让新手设计师陷入恐慌:​​“昨天,我了解了玩这个游戏的正确方法——但随着这些新的变化,我不确定该如何玩它!”他们觉得自己已经失去了对自己游戏的掌控。但实际上,游戏刚刚向前迈出了一大步!它不再具有主导策略,现在需要做出有意义的选择。你不应该害怕这一刻,而应该珍惜它,并抓住机会看看你是否能理解为什么当前的规则和价值观配置会让你的游戏保持平衡。

In early development of a game, dominant strategies abound. As the game continues development, these strategies start to get properly balanced. Paradoxically, this often throws novice designers into a panic: “Yesterday, I understood the right way to play this game—but with these new changes, I’m not sure about the right way to play it!” They feel like they have lost their handle on their own game. But in reality, the game has just taken a big step forward! It no longer has a dominant strategy, and now there are meaningful choices to be made. Instead of fearing this moment, you should cherish it and take the opportunity to see if you can understand why the current configuration of rules and values is putting your game into balance.

但这又引出了另一个问题:我们应该给玩家多少个有意义的选择?Michael Mateas 指出,玩家寻求的选择数量取决于他们想要的东西的数量:

But this leads to another question: how many meaningful choices should we give to a player? Michael Mateas points out that the number of choices a player seeks is dependent on the number of things they desire:

  • 如果选择>愿望,那么玩家就会不知所措。

  • If choices > desires, then the player is overwhelmed.

  • 如果选择<愿望,玩家就会感到沮丧。

  • If choices < desires, the player is frustrated.

  • 如果选择=愿望,玩家就会有一种自由和满足的感觉。

  • If choices = desires, the player has a feeling of freedom and fulfillment.

因此,要正确确定选择的数量,您需要弄清楚玩家想要做的事情的类型和数量。在某些情况下,玩家只需要少量有意义的选择(选择走左路还是右路很有趣——选择走三十条岔路中的一条就让人不知所措了)。其他时候,需要大量的选择(例如,《模拟人生》中的服装购物界面)。

So, to properly determine the number of choices, you need to figure out the types and number of things the player would like to do. In some situations, the player wants only a small number of meaningful choices (choosing to take the left or right fork in the road is interesting—choosing to take one of thirty side roads is overwhelming). Other times, a huge number of choices are desired (e.g., a clothes shopping interface in the Sims).

有意义的选择是互动的核心,有一个视角来审视它们非常有用。

Meaningful choices are the heart of interactivity, and having a lens to examine them is quite useful.

三角性

对于玩家来说,最令人兴奋和最有趣的选择之一是,是稳妥行事追求小回报,还是冒大风险争取大回报。如果游戏平衡性得当,这是一个很难做出的决定。我发现大约有八成的人来找我,要求我改进游戏原型,因为他们认为“游戏原型一点也不好玩”;游戏缺少这种有意义的选择。你可以称之为“平衡的不对称风险”,因为你要在低风险低回报与高风险高回报之间取得平衡,但这有点拗口。这种关系出现的频率如此之高,而且如此重要,所以我喜欢给它起一个更简短的名字:三角性。玩家是三角形的一个点,低风险选择是第二个点,高风险选择是第三个点。

One of the most exciting and interesting choices for a player to make is whether to play it safe and go for a small reward or take a big risk to try for a big reward. This is a hard decision to make, if the game is balanced properly. I find that about eight out of ten times someone comes to me asking for help on a game prototype that “just isn’t fun”; the game is missing this kind of meaningful choice. You could call this “balanced asymmetric risk,” since you are balancing a low risk with low reward against a high risk for high reward, but that is kind of a mouthful. This relationship comes up so often, and is so important, that I like to give it a shorter name: triangularity. The player is one point of the triangle, the low-risk choice is the second point, and the high-risk choice is the third.

具有良好三角关系的游戏示例是《太空侵略者》。游戏中大部分时间,你都在向飞船附近得分较低的外星人射击,这些外星人分别值 10、20 和 30 分。它们移动缓慢,易于射击,射击它们可以让你更安全,因为这样可以阻止它们向你投掷炸弹。然而,偶尔会有一个小红飞碟飞过屏幕顶部。它不构成威胁,而且射击起来相当困难和危险。射击困难是因为它移动且距离很远,危险是因为无法正确瞄准看到它时,你必须把视线从飞船上移开才能看它,而且你还冒着被炸弹击中的风险。不过,它值 100 到 300 分!没有飞碟,太空侵略者会变得相当乏味,因为你的选择很少——你只能射击、射击、射击。有了飞碟,你偶尔会面临一个非常困难、有意义的选择——你应该谨慎行事还是冒险争取大分?三角性非常重要,因此它有自己的镜头。

An example of a game that has good triangularity is Space Invaders. Most of the time in the game you are shooting at low point aliens near your ship worth 10, 20, and 30 points. They are slow moving and easy to shoot, and shooting them makes you safer because it stops them from dropping bombs on you. Every once in a while, however, a little red flying saucer flies across the top of the screen. It poses no threat, and it is quite difficult and dangerous to shoot. It is difficult because it is moving and far away, and it is dangerous because to properly aim at it, you have to take your eyes off your ship to look at it, and you risk getting hit by a bomb. However, it is worth between 100 and 300 points! Without the flying saucer, Space Invaders gets quite tedious, because your choices are few—you just shoot and shoot and shoot. With the flying saucer, you occasionally have a very difficult, meaningful choice to make—should you play it safe or take a risk and go for the big points? Triangularity is so important that it gets its own lens.



13.3

FIGURE

13.3

史蒂芬·利维 (Steven Levy) 的《黑客》一书中有一个经典的三角关系示例。麻省理工学院的一名工程师破解了一台自动售货机,让每个用户做出选择:像往常一样以正常价格从自动售货机购买零食,或者碰碰运气。可以翻转一枚数字硬币,结果是你的零食要么价格翻倍,要么完全免费。

A classic example of triangularity appears in the book Hackers by Steven Levy. An MIT engineer hacked a vending machine giving each user a choice: get your snack from the vending machine for normal price as usual or take a chance. A digital coin could be flipped, resulting in your snack either costing double or being completely free.

确保三角平衡的一个好方法是使用镜头 #35期望值。街机游戏 Qix 提供了一个使用期望值进行平衡的有趣示例。在其中,您尝试绘制矩形形状来围绕空白游戏板上的区域。当您执行此操作时,一团称为 Qix 的线会随机漂浮在棋盘周围。如果 Qix 在您完成绘制之前触及您的一个矩形,您就会死。但如果您完成了矩形的绘制,那么您就占领了棋盘的该区域。当您覆盖了棋盘的 75% 时,您就赢了。

A good way to make sure your triangularity is balanced is to use Lens #35: Expected Value. The arcade game Qix provides an interesting example of balancing with expected values. In it, you try to draw rectangular shapes to surround territory on a blank game board. While you do this, a blob of lines, called the Qix, floats around the board at random. If the Qix touches one of your rectangles before you finish drawing it, you die. But if you finish drawing the rectangle, then you claim that area of the board. When you have covered 75% of the board, you win the level.

游戏设计者给了玩家一个非常明确的选择——每次你画一个矩形时,你可以快速移动(画一个蓝色矩形)或以半速移动(画一个橙色矩形)。由于以半速移动的危险性是原来的两倍,所以以半速绘制的矩形会得到双倍的分数。这是可行的,因为如果我们假设成功绘制一个快速蓝色矩形的几率为 20%,并且价值 100 分,那么尝试绘制一个矩形的预期值就是 100 分 × 20% = 20 分。我们还知道以半速绘制矩形的成功几率是一半,所以我们得到了一个表格,如下所示:

The designers of the game give the player a very explicit choice—each time you draw a rectangle, you can either move quickly (drawing a blue rectangle) or at half speed (drawing an orange rectangle). Since moving at half speed is twice as dangerous, rectangles drawn at half speed are given double the points. This works because if we assume that the chance of successfully drawing a fast, blue rectangle is 20% and it is worth 100 points, then the expected value of attempting to draw one is 100 points × 20% = 20 points. We also know that drawing a rectangle at half speed has half the chance of succeeding, so we get a table that looks like this:

速度

Speed

成功率(%)

Chance of Success (%)

积分

Points

期望值

Expected Value

快速(蓝色)

Fast (blue)

20

20

100

100

20

20

慢速(橙色)

Slow (orange)

10

10

?

20

20

我们希望游戏保持平衡,因此我们保持预期值不变。很容易看出,如果我们希望游戏保持平衡,那么相同大小的慢速矩形的分值应该是 200 分。这种事情的难点在于确定成功的机会——我们经常需要估算——但这是另一种情况,即模型会通知原型,而测试原型会通知模型,从而形成一个良性循环,最终模型是正确的,游戏是平衡的。

We want the game to be balanced, so we keep the expected value constant. It is pretty easy to see that if we want the game to be balanced, the point value should be 200 points for the same size slow rectangle. The difficult part with this kind of thing is figuring out the chance of success—we often have to estimate—but this is another case where the model informs the prototype and testing the prototype informs the model, creating a virtuous circle where eventually the model is correct and the game is balanced.

马里奥赛车是一场三角交响曲。它一次又一次地给你带来高风险/低风险的选择和适当的回报。例子包括:

Mario Kart is a symphony of triangularity. Again and again, it brings you high-risk/low-risk choices with appropriate payoffs. Examples include the following:

  • 手动还是自动?手动需要更多技巧才能使用,但如果使用得当,它可以提高您的速度。

  • Manual or automatic? Manual requires more skill to use, but when used well, it gives you more speed boosts.

  • 卡丁车还是自行车?卡丁车的基本速度更快,但如果你骑自行车做前轮离地动作(这很危险,因为在前轮离地动作中你不能转弯),你的速度会比卡丁车快。

  • Kart or bike? Karts have a faster base speed—but if you do a wheelie on a bike (which is risky because you can’t turn during a wheelie), you go faster than the karts do.

  • 抓住能量提升?(冒着崩溃的风险)还是忽略它们?

  • Grab power-ups? (risking a crash) or ignore them?

  • 使用能量增强?(可能会分散你的注意力)还是忽略它们?

  • Use power-ups? (risk breaking your concentration) or ignore them?

  • 保留您已有的能量提升?还是将其丢弃,换取新的?

  • Keep the power-up you’ve got? or dump it in favor of a new one?

  • 使用加速垫?它们可以加速,但通常位于危险的位置。

  • Use speed boost pads? They speed you up but tend to be in dangerous locations.

  • 提前踩油门?如果你在起跑线上提前踩油门,如果时间正确,你会获得加速,如果时间错误,你会感到沮丧。

  • Hit the gas early? If you hit the gas early at the starting line, you get a speed boost if you time it right, and a frustrating delay if you time it wrong.

  • 左边还是右边?许多赛道都有分叉路,有低风险路段和高风险路段——当然,高风险路段的速度提升更多。

  • Left or right? Many tracks include forking tracks that have a low-risk and high-risk path—and of course the high-risk path has more speed boosts.

平衡类型#4:技能与机会

Balancing Type #4: Skill vs. Chance

第 12 章中,我们详细讨论了技能和运气的机制。从真正意义上讲,在任何游戏设计中,这都是两种对立的力量。过多的运气会抵消玩家技能的效果,反之亦然。这个问题没有简单的答案——一些玩家喜欢运气元素尽可能少的游戏,而其他玩家则相反。技能游戏更像是体育竞赛——通过判断系统来决定哪个玩家最棒。运气游戏通常具有更轻松、更随意的性质——毕竟,结果很大程度上取决于命运。为了取得平衡,你必须使用镜头 #19玩家,来了解对你的游戏受众来说,多少技能和多少运气才是合适的。偏好的差异有时由年龄或性别决定,有时甚至由文化决定;例如,与美国玩家相比,德国棋盘游戏玩家似乎更喜欢将运气影响降至最低的游戏。

In Chapter 12, we talked in detail about the mechanics of skill and chance. In a real sense, these are two opposing forces in any game design. Too much chance negates the effects of player skill and vice versa. There is no easy answer for this one—some players prefer games with as few elements of chance as possible, and other players prefer the opposite. Games of skill tend to be more like athletic contests—systems of judgment that determine which player is the best. Games of chance often have a more relaxed, casual nature—after all, much of the outcome is up to fate. To strike the balance, you must use Lens #19: The Player, to understand how much skill and how much chance will be the right amount for the audience of your game. Differences in preference are sometimes determined by age or gender, and sometimes even by culture; for example, German board game players seem to prefer games that minimize the effects of chance more so than, say, American players.

平衡两者的一个非常常见的方法是在游戏中交替使用机会和技巧。例如,发牌是纯粹的机会,但选择如何打牌则是纯粹的技巧。掷骰子来决定移动多远是纯粹的机会,而决定将棋子移动到哪里则是纯粹的技巧。这可以创造一种紧张和放松的交替模式,这对玩家来说非常令人愉悦。

One very common method of balancing these is to alternate the use of chance and skill in a game. For example, dealing out a hand of cards is pure chance—but choosing how to play them is pure skill. Rolling a die to see how far you move is pure chance—deciding where to move your piece is pure skill. This can create an alternating pattern of tension and relaxation that can be very pleasing to players.

设计师 David Perry 建议,让游戏设计令人上瘾的关键是让玩家始终在做三件事:锻炼技能、冒险和制定策略。玩家在冒险时,在某种程度上都会面临机会,这一点毋庸置疑。

Designer David Perry advises that the key to addictive game design is designing your game such that players are doing three things at all times: exercising a skill, taking risks, and working a strategy. And it is certainly true that any time players are taking risks, they are up against chance, in some way.

选择如何平衡技能和机会将决定你的游戏的特点。用这个视角仔细审视它。

Choosing how to balance skill and chance will determine the character of your game. Examine it closely with this lens.

平衡类型#5:头部与手部

Balancing Type #5: Head vs. Hands

这种平衡非常简单:游戏中有多少内容需要进行具有挑战性的体力活动(无论是转向、投掷还是灵巧地按下按钮),又有多少内容需要思考?这两件事并不像表面上看起来那么分明——许多游戏都涉及不断制定策略和解谜,同时还要展示速度和灵巧的技巧。其他游戏交替使用这两种游戏类型以增加多样性。以“动作平台”游戏类型为例——玩家需要通过关卡,灵巧地引导角色跳过障碍物,并可能向敌人射击,偶尔停下来解决一些阻碍你通关的小谜题。通常,关卡结束时会出现“怪物大王”,这会增加游戏的紧张程度,只有通过解谜(“哦!我必须跳到它的尾巴上,让它放下盾牌一秒钟!”)和灵巧(“我只有一​​秒钟的时间将箭射入那个狭窄的缝隙!”)才能击败它。

This type of balancing is quite straightforward: how much of the game should involve doing a challenging physical activity (be it steering, throwing, or pushing buttons dexterously), and how much of it should involve thinking? These two things are not as separate as they might seem on the surface—many games involve constant strategizing and puzzle solving while simultaneously pulling off feats of speed and dexterity. Other games alternate the two types of gameplay for variety. Consider the “action platform” game genre—you work your way through a level, dexterously guiding your avatar to jump over obstacles, and maybe shooting at enemies, occasionally pausing to solve some small puzzle that prevents you from clearing the level. Often, the intensity is increased at the end of a level by a “boss monster,” who can only be defeated through a mix of puzzle solving (“Oh! I have to jump on its tail, and that makes it drop its shield for a second!”) and dexterity (“I only have a second to shoot an arrow into that narrow gap!”).

不过,了解目标市场在游戏中更喜欢什么很重要——更多思考还是更多灵活性?同样重要的是,你的游戏要清楚地传达出你选择融入的平衡性。以世嘉 Genesis 的非常不寻常的游戏《吃豆人 2:新冒险》为例。游戏名称表明它将是一款动作和一点策略的游戏,就像原版吃豆人一样。但快速看一眼包装盒就会发现另一个故事——这似乎是一款 2D 平台游戏,就像超级马里奥兄弟刺猬索尼克一样,这意味着动作加上一点解谜。但实际上,玩这款游戏后,你会发现完全不同的东西!虽然从视觉上看,它看起来像是一款动作平台游戏,但它实际上是一款奇怪的心理谜题游戏,玩家巧妙地引导吃豆人进入不同的情绪状态,让他克服各种障碍。那些期待动作多而思考少的玩家会感到失望——寻找解谜游戏的玩家通常不会玩这款游戏,因为他们拒绝了它“以动作为基础”的外观。

It is important, though, to understand what your target market prefers in a game—more thinking or more dexterity? And it is equally important that your game clearly communicate what balance you have chosen to put into it. Consider the very unusual game Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures for the Sega Genesis. The name suggested that it would be a game of action and a little strategy, like the original Pac-Man. But a quick glance at the box told another story—this appeared to be a 2D platform game, like Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog, which meant action plus a little puzzle solving. But actually, playing the game revealed something completely different! Though it visually looked like an action platform game, it was really a game of strange psychological puzzles, where you subtly guided Pac-Man into different emotional states to get him to get past various obstacles. Players expecting mostly action and little thinking were disappointed—players looking for a game about puzzle solving generally didn’t play the game, rejecting it based on its “action-based” appearance.

《游戏杂志》评论一款电子游戏时,他们会根据“手指”和“大脑”的滑动比例对游戏进行排名。人们很容易忘记,一款需要大量按键的游戏仍然需要大量的思考和策略。使用镜头 #34技能,了解游戏中的不同技能,然后使用此镜头平衡这些技能。

When Games Magazine reviews a videogame, they give it a ranking on a sliding scale where one end is “fingers” and the other end is “brain.” It can be easy to forget that a game with a lot of button pushing can still involve a lot of thought and strategy. Use Lens #34: Skill, to understand the different skills in your game, and then use this lens to balance those skills.

平衡类型#6:竞争与合作

Balance Type #6: Competition vs. Cooperation

竞争与合作是动物的基本需求。所有高等动物都被迫与其他动物竞争,部分是为了生存,部分是为了确立自己的地位。社区。与此相反,还有一种与他人合作的基本本能,因为团队拥有许多眼睛和双手以及各种能力,总是比个人更强大。竞争和合作对我们的生存如此重要,以至于我们需要尝试它们——部分是为了更好地掌握它们,部分是为了了解我们的朋友和家人——这样我们就能更好地了解谁擅长什么以及我们如何合作。游戏提供了一种非常安全的方式来探索我们周围的人在压力情况下的行为——这是我们喜欢一起玩游戏的一个秘密原因。

Competition and cooperation are basic, animal urges. All higher animals are driven to compete against others partly for survival and partly to establish their status in the community. Opposite of that, there is also a basic instinct to cooperate with others, since a team, with its many eyes and hands and its diverse abilities, is always more powerful than an individual. Competition and cooperation are so important to our survival that we need to experiment with them—partly to get better at them and partly to learn about our friends and family—so we get a better sense of who is good at what and how we can work together. Games provide a very socially safe way to explore how the people around us behave in stressful situations—this is a secret reason we like to play games together.

说到游戏,竞争性游戏比合作性游戏更常见,不过也有一些非常有趣的合作性游戏。《Overcooked》需要玩家齐心协力烹饪菜肴以拯救世界。棋盘游戏《Pandemic》是一个引人入胜的例子,玩家根本不竞争,而是协调努力,试图以团队的形式赢得游戏。

When it comes to games, competitive games are more common than cooperative ones, though some very interesting cooperative games have been created. Overcooked needs players to work together to cook dishes in order to save the world. And the board game Pandemic is a fascinating example of a game where the players do not compete at all, but instead coordinate their efforts in an attempt to win the game as a group.

有些游戏找到了将竞争与合作融为一体的有趣方式。街机游戏 Joust 可以单人玩,玩家与许多计算机控制的敌人竞争,也可以以双人模式玩,两名玩家在同一竞技场中一起对抗敌人。Joust 中的竞争与合作之间存在着一种非常有趣的张力:在竞争方面,玩家根据他们击败的敌人数量获得积分,如果他们愿意,他们可以相互战斗。但在合作方面,如果玩家协调攻击并互相保护,他们可以总体获得更高的分数。由玩家决定是试图击败对方(获得最高的相对分数)还是试图赢得游戏(试图获得最高的绝对分数)。游戏强调了这种张力:有些级别被指定为“团队浪潮”——如果两名玩家都能通过该级别,他们每人将获得 3000 奖励积分。其他级别被指定为“角斗士浪潮”——第一个击败对方的玩家将获得 3000 奖励积分。这种合作与竞争之间的有趣交替为游戏带来了丰富的变化,并让玩家探索他们的伙伴是对合作还是竞争更感兴趣。

Some games find interesting ways to blend competition and cooperation. The arcade game Joust can be played solo, where a player competes against many computer-controlled enemies, or it can be played in a two-player mode, where both players compete against enemies together in the same arena. There is a tension between competition and cooperation in Joust that is very interesting: On the competitive side, the players get points based on how many enemies they defeat, and they can battle each other if they choose. But on the cooperative side, players can get higher scores overall if they coordinate their attacks and protect each other. It is up to the players to decide whether they are trying to beat each other (getting the highest relative score) or trying to beat the game (trying to get the highest absolute score). The game plays up this tension: some levels are designated “Team Wave”—if both players can survive the level, they each get 3000 bonus points. Other levels are designated “Gladiator Wave”—the first player who defeats the other gets 3000 bonus points. This interesting alternation between cooperation and competition gives the game a lot of variety and lets players explore whether their partner is more interested in cooperation or competition.

虽然竞争与合作截然相反,但两者可以很方便地结合在一起,让你获得两全其美的效果。怎么做到的?通过团队竞争!网络游戏在体育运动中很常见,而网络游戏的兴起让团队竞争在电子游戏世界中蓬勃发展。

And while competition and cooperation are polar opposites, they can be quite conveniently combined into a situation where you get the best of both. How? Through team competition! Common in athletic sports, the rise of networked gaming has allowed team competition to grow and thrive in the world of videogames.

竞争与合作如此重要,我们需要三个视角来正确审视它们。

Competition and cooperation are so important that we need three lenses to examine them properly.

随着越来越多的游戏上线,不同类型的竞争和合作机会也越来越多,从两人之间的休闲多人国际象棋游戏到大型多人在线角色扮演游戏 (MMORPG) 中数千名玩家的竞争行会。但驱使我们享受竞争和合作的心理力量并没有改变——你越能理解和平衡这些力量,你的游戏就会越强大。

As more and more games go online, more opportunities for different types of competition and collaboration become available, from casual multiplayer games of chess between two people to competing guilds of thousands of players in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). But the psychological forces that drive us to enjoy competition and cooperation have not changed—the better you can understand and balance these forces, the stronger your game will become.

平衡类型#7:空头与多头

Balance Type #7: Short vs. Long

每款游戏都需要平衡的一个重要因素就是游戏时长。如果游戏时间太短,玩家可能没有机会制定和执行有意义的策略。但如果游戏时间太长,玩家可能会感到无聊,或者他们可能会因为玩游戏需要投入太多时间而避开游戏。

One important thing to balance in every game is the length of the gameplay. If the game is too short, players may not get a chance to develop and execute meaningful strategies. But if the game goes on too long, players may grow bored, or they may avoid the game because playing it requires too much of a time commitment.

决定游戏时长的东西往往很微妙。例如,如果按照官方规则进行,大富翁游戏通常在 90 分钟左右结束。但许多玩家发现这些规则太过苛刻,于是修改规则,发放现金大奖,并放宽购买房产时间的限制,这反过来又使游戏时间更长,通常为 3 小时甚至更长时间。

The things that determine the length of a game are often subtle. The game of Monopoly, for example, when played by the official rules, often ends in about ninety minutes. But many players find these rules too harsh and modify them to give out cash jackpots and ease the restrictions on when you must purchase properties, which as a side effect makes the game last much longer, typically three hours, or even more.

决定游戏何时结束的主要因素是胜负条件。通过改变这些条件,你可以显著改变游戏的长度。街机游戏《间谍猎人》的设计师想出了一个非常有趣的系统来平衡游戏的长度。在《间谍猎人》中,你驾驶一辆汽车,在高速公路上用机枪向敌人射击。在早期的原型中,当你的汽车被摧毁三次时,游戏就结束了。这个游戏非常具有挑战性,特别是对于新手玩家而言。设计师发现这些玩家的游戏时间很短而且感到沮丧,所以他们引入了一条新规则:在游戏的前 90 秒内,玩家拥有无限量的汽车——在这段时间内他们不能输掉游戏。在那段时间结束后,他们只剩下几辆汽车,当它们被摧毁时,游戏就结束了。

The main factors that determine when a game ends are the win or lose conditions. By altering these conditions, you can dramatically change the length of the game. The designers of the arcade game Spy Hunter came up with a very interesting system to balance the length of their game. In Spy Hunter, you drive a car that fires machine guns at enemies on a highway. In early prototypes, when your car was destroyed three times, the game was over. The game is very challenging, particularly for novice players, and the designers found that these players were having very short games and feeling frustrated—so they introduced a new rule: For the first ninety seconds of gameplay, the player has an unlimited supply of cars—they cannot lose the game during this time. After that time is up, they only have a few cars, and when they are destroyed, the game is over.

Minotaur的设计师(后来他们制作了Halo)还有另一种有趣的方法来平衡游戏的长度。Minotaur是一款网络游戏,最多四名玩家会在迷宫中奔跑,收集武器和咒语,并试图消灭迷宫中的其他玩家。当只剩下一名玩家活着时,游戏结束。设计师们看到了一个问题,如果玩家不互相对抗,就会陷入僵局,游戏就会变得无聊。解决这个问题的一种方法是设置时间限制,并根据积分系统宣布获胜者,但他们却做了一件更优雅的事情。他们制定了一条新规则:二十分钟后,铃声响起,“世界末日”开始了;所有幸存的玩家突然被传送到一个充满怪物和其他危险的小房间,没有人能在那里活很久。这样,游戏就能保证在二十五分钟内以一种相当戏剧性的方式结束,而一名玩家仍然可以被宣布为获胜者。现代“大逃杀”游戏也遵循了同样的模式,在固定的时间段内逐渐缩小区域,最终迫使所有幸存的玩家相互相遇。

The designers of Minotaur (who later went on to make Halo) had another interesting method of balancing the length of their game. Minotaur was a networked game where up to four players would run around a maze, gathering weapons and spells, and try to destroy the other players in the maze. The game ends when only one player is left alive. The designers saw a problem where a stalemate could result if players don’t confront each other and the game would run the risk of becoming boring. One way to solve the problem would be to set a time limit and declare a winner based on a point system, but instead they did something much more elegant. They created a new rule: after twenty minutes, a bell sounds, and “Armageddon” begins; all surviving players are suddenly transported to a small room filled with monsters and other hazards, where no one can survive for long. This way, the game is guaranteed to end in less than twenty-five minutes, in a rather dramatic fashion, and one player can still be declared the winner. Modern “battle royale” games have followed this same model, gradually shrinking the area over a fixed time period, eventually forcing all surviving players to encounter one another.

平衡类型#8:奖励

Balance Type #8: Rewards

君王应当迅速奖赏,缓慢惩罚。

—奥维德

A prince should be quick to reward and slow to punish.

—Ovid

为什么人们会花这么多时间玩电子游戏,只是为了获得高分?我们之前讨论过游戏如何成为评判结构,以及人们希望得到评判。但人们不只是想要任何评判——他们希望得到有利的评价。奖励是游戏告诉玩家“你做得很好”的方式。

Why is it that people will spend so much time playing a videogame, just to get a good score? We have talked earlier about how games become structures of judgment and that people want to be judged. But people don’t just want any judgment—they want to be judged favorably. Rewards are the way the game tells the player “you have done well.”

游戏通常会提供几种常见的奖励。每种奖励都不同,但它们都有一个共同点:它们可以满足玩家的愿望。

There are several common types of rewards that games tend to give. Each is different, but they all have one thing in common—they fulfill the player’s desires.

  • 表扬:最简单的奖励,游戏只是通过明确的陈述、特殊的音效,甚至是游戏角色对你说话来告诉你你做得很好。所有这些都归结为一件事:游戏已经判断了你你,它就会赞同。任天堂游戏以通过声音和动画为玩家获得的每个奖励提供大量二次赞扬而闻名。

  • Praise: The simplest of rewards, the game just tells you that you did good work, through either an explicit statement, a special sound effect, or even an in-game character speaking to you. It all amounts to the same thing: the game has judged you, and it approves. Nintendo games are famous for giving players lots of secondary praise via sounds and animations for every reward they get.

  • 点数:在许多游戏中,点数除了衡量玩家的成功(无论是通过技能还是运气)之外没有任何用处。有时这些点数是获得其他奖励的途径,但通常,衡量您的成功就足够了——尤其是当其他人可以在高分榜上看到它时。

  • Points: In many games, points serve no purpose than a measure of the player’s success, be it through skill or luck. Sometimes these points are a gateway to another reward, but often, this measurement of your success is enough—particularly if others can see it on a high score list.

  • 延长游戏时间:在许多游戏中(例如弹球游戏),游戏的目标是冒着资源(在弹球游戏中,就是您的球)的风险,尽可能多地获得积分,同时又不失去您投入的风险(您的球会付诸东流)。在具有这种“生命”结构的游戏中,玩家可以获得的最有价值的奖励是一条额外的生命。其他具有时间限制的游戏会通过增加游戏时间来奖励玩家,这实际上是一样的。延长游戏时间是可取的,因为它可以提高分数并衡量成功率,但它也利用了我们人类天生的生存欲望。现代免费游戏对此进行了轻微的改动,采用了“能量”模型。耗尽能量后,游戏将暂停,直到您支付更多费用或经过一定小时数。

  • Prolonged play: In many games (pinball, for example), the goal of the game is to risk resources (in pinball, your ball) to rack up as many points as possible without losing what you have put at risk (your ball down the drain). In games with this structure of “lives,” the most valuable reward a player can get is an extra life. Other games that have time limits reward players by adding time to their play session, which really amounts to the same thing. Prolonged play is desirable because it allows for a higher score and a measure of success, but it also taps into our natural human drive for survival. Modern free to play games have a slight twist on this with the “energy” model. Run out of energy, and play is paused until you pay for more or until a certain number of hours pass.

  • 门户:我们渴望得到正面评价,但我们也渴望探索。游戏结构通过将您带入游戏的新部分来奖励成功,满足了这种基本需求。每当您获得进入新关卡的权限或赢得一把上锁的门的钥匙时,您就获得了门户奖励。

  • A gateway: While we have a desire to be judged favorably, we also have a desire to explore. Game structures that reward success by moving you to new parts of the game satisfy this basic urge. Anytime you earn access to a new level or win a key to a locked door, you have received a gateway reward.

  • 奇观:我们喜欢欣赏美丽而有趣的事物。游戏通常会播放音乐或展示动画作为简单的奖励。《吃豆人》第 2 关末尾的“中场休息”可能是电子游戏中的第一个例子。这种奖励本身很少能让玩家满意,因此它往往与其他类型的奖励搭配使用。

  • Spectacle: We like to enjoy beautiful and interesting things. Often, games will play music or show animations as a simple reward. The “intermission” at the end of level 2 in Pac-Man was probably the first example of this in a videogame. This kind of reward seldom satisfies players on its own, so it tends to be paired with other types of rewards.

  • 表达:许多玩家喜欢在游戏中用特殊的衣服或装饰来表达自己。尽管这些通常与游戏目标无关,但它们可以为玩家带来极大的乐趣,并满足玩家在世界上留下印记的基本欲望。

  • Expression: Many players like to express themselves within a game with special clothes or decorations. Even though these often have nothing to do with a goal in the game, they can be great fun for a player and satisfy a basic urge to make a mark on the world.

  • 力量:在现实生活中,每个人都渴望变得更强大,而在游戏中,变得更强大可能会提高游戏对玩家成功的判断。这些力量可以有多种形式:在跳棋中成为“国王”,在《超级马里奥世界》中变高,在《刺猬索尼克》中加速,在《使命召唤》中获得特殊武器。所有力量的共同点是,它们让你能够比以前更快地实现目标。

  • Powers: Becoming more powerful is something that everyone desires in real life, and in a game, becoming more powerful is likely to improve the game’s judgment of a player’s success. These powers can come in many forms: getting “kinged” in checkers, becoming tall in Super Mario World, speeding up in Sonic the Hedgehog, and getting special weaponry in Call of Duty. The thing all powers have in common is that they give you a way to reach your goal more quickly than you could before.

  • 资源:虽然赌场游戏和彩票会奖励玩家真钱,但电子游戏更经常奖励玩家只能在游戏中使用的资源(例如食物、能量、弹药、生命值)。有些游戏不直接提供资源,而是提供虚拟货币,玩家可以选择如何使用。通常,可以用这些钱购买的东西是资源、权力、长时间游戏或表达。当然,免费游戏模糊了这种区别,让你花真钱来获得虚拟货币(但几乎从来不会反过来)。

  • Resources: While casino games and lotteries reward the player with real money, videogames more frequently reward the player with resources they can only use in the game (e.g., food, energy, ammunition, hit points). Some games, instead of giving resources directly, give virtual money that the player can choose how to spend. Usually the things that one can buy with this money are resources, powers, prolonged play, or expression. Free to play games, of course, blur this distinction by letting you spend real money to get virtual money (but almost never the other way around).

  • 地位:较高的排行榜排名、特殊成就或任何其他可让玩家在玩家社区中享有更高地位的奖励都是非常理想的奖励,尤其是对于有竞争力的玩家而言。

  • Status: High leaderboard rankings, special achievements, or anything else that gives a player higher status in the community of players can be very desirable award, especially to competitive players.

  • 完成:完成游戏中的所有目标会给玩家带来一种特殊的结束感,这种感觉在现实生活中解决问题时很少能得到。在许多游戏中,这是终极奖励——当你达到这一点时,通常就没有必要再继续玩游戏了。

  • Completion: Completing all the goals in a game gives a special feeling of closure to players that they seldom get from solving problems in real life. In many games, this is the ultimate reward—when you have reached this point, there is often no point in playing the game any further.

游戏中的大多数奖励都属于上述一个或多个类别,尽管这些类别通常以有趣的方式组合在一起。许多游戏会用积分奖励玩家,但当积分达到一定分数时,玩家会获得额外生命的奖励(资源、延长游戏时间)。通常,玩家会得到一个特殊物品(资源),让他们做一些新的事情(能力)。其他游戏允许玩家输入他们的名字或画一幅画(表情),如果他们获得高分(积分)。有些游戏在玩家解锁游戏中的每个区域(入口)时,会在最后(完成)显示一​​个特殊的动画(奇观)。

Most of the rewards you will encounter in games fall into one or more of the aforementioned categories, though these categories are often combined in interesting ways. Many games reward the player with points, but when the points reach a certain score, the player gets a bonus reward of an extra life (resource, prolonged play). Often, players will get a special item (resource) that lets them do something new (powers). Other games let a player enter their name or draw a picture (expression) if they get a high score (points). Some games show a special animation (spectacle) at the end (completion) if the player unlocks every area in the game (gateway).

但如何平衡这些奖励?也就是说,应该给出多少奖励,以及哪些奖励?这是一个难题,几乎每个游戏的答案都不同。通常,游戏中可以加入的奖励类型越多越好。心理学领域的另外两个奖励经验法则包括:

But how to balance these rewards? That is, how many should be given out, and which ones? This is a difficult question, and the answer is different for almost every game. Generally, the more types of rewards you can work into your game, the better. Two other reward rules of thumb from the world of psychology include the following:

  • 人们往往会随着获得的奖励越多而逐渐适应,一个小时前还算不错的奖励现在就没什么大不了的了。许多游戏使用一种简单的方法来克服这个问题,就是随着玩家在游戏中的进展逐渐增加奖励的价值。在某种程度上,这是一个俗气的把戏,但它确实有效——即使你知道设计师在做什么以及为什么这么做,在进入游戏的新部分时突然获得更大的奖励仍然会让你感到非常有成就感。

  • People have a tendency to get acclimated to rewards the more they receive them, and what was rewarding an hour ago is no big deal now. One simple method many games use to overcome this is to gradually increase the value of the rewards as the player progresses in the game. In a way, this is a cheesy trick, but it works—even when you know the designer is doing it and why, it still feels very rewarding to suddenly get bigger rewards in conjunction with getting to a new part of a game.

  • 数千个心理学实验已经证实了可变奖励比固定奖励更有威力。例如,如果你打败的每个怪物都会给你 10 分,那么很快就会变得可预测且无聊——但如果你打败的每个怪物都有 2/3 的几率给你 0 分,但有 1/3 的几率给你 30 分,那么即使你平均得到的分数相同,这种奖励也会持续更长时间。这就像带甜甜圈上班——如果你每周五都带,人们就会期待并认为这是理所当然的。但如果你偶尔在随机的日子带,每次都会有惊喜。三角性对玩家如此有趣的部分原因是它与可变奖励的联系。

  • The power of variable rewards over fixed ones has been proven in thousands of psychological experiments. For example, if every monster you defeat gives you ten points, that gets predictable and boring pretty quickly—but if every monster you defeat has a 2/3 chance of giving you zero points, but a 1/3 chance of giving you thirty points, this stays rewarding for a much longer time, even though you are receiving the same number of points on average. It’s like bringing donuts to work—if you bring them every Friday, people will come to expect them and take them for granted. But if you bring them every now and then on random days, they are a delightful surprise each time. Part of what makes triangularity so interesting to players is its connection to variable reward.

平衡类型#9:惩罚

Balance Type #9: Punishment

游戏惩罚玩家的想法似乎有点奇怪——游戏不是应该很有趣吗?但矛盾的是,适当使用惩罚可以增加玩家从游戏中获得的乐趣。以下是游戏可能惩罚玩家的一些原因:

The idea of a game that punishes the player can seem a little strange—aren’t games supposed to be fun? Paradoxically, though, punishment used properly can increase the enjoyment that players get from games. Here are some reasons that a game might punish players:

  • 惩罚创造内生价值:我们已经讨论了在游戏中创造价值的重要性(镜头#7:内生价值)。如果游戏中的资源有机会被夺走,它们的价值就会更高。

  • Punishment creates endogenous value: We’ve talked about the importance of creating value within a game (Lens #7: Endogenous Value). Resources in a game are worth more if there is a chance they can be taken away.

  • 冒险是令人兴奋的:特别是如果潜在回报与风险相平衡!但只有在有负面后果或惩罚的情况下你才可以冒险。让玩家有机会冒着可怕的后果会让成功变得更加甜蜜。

  • Taking risks is exciting: Particularly if the potential rewards are balanced against the risks! But you can only take risks if there are negative consequences or punishments. Giving players a chance to risk terrible consequences makes success much, much sweeter.

  • 可能的惩罚会增加挑战性:我们讨论了挑战玩家的重要性——当失败意味着游戏中的惩罚性挫折时,游戏的挑战性就会增加。增加失败带来的惩罚可能是增加挑战性的一种方法。

  • Possible punishment increases challenge: We’ve discussed the importance of challenging players—when failure means a punishing setback in the game, the challenge of play increases. Increasing the punishment that comes with failure can be one way to increase the challenge.

以下是游戏中常见的几种惩罚类型。其中许多只是反向奖励。

Here are some common types of punishment used in games. Many of them are simply rewards in reverse.

  • 羞辱:与表扬相反,这只是游戏告诉你你做得不好。这可以通过明确的信息(例如,“失败”或“失败!”)或令人沮丧的动画、音效和音乐来实现。

  • Shaming: The opposite of praise, this is simply the game telling you that you are doing a bad job. This can happen with explicit messages (e.g., “Missed” or “Defeated!”) or with discouraging animations, sound effects, and music.

  • 扣分:玩家觉得这种惩罚太痛苦了,所以在电子游戏甚至传统游戏和体育运动中,这种惩罚都相对少见。也许这并不是因为这种惩罚很痛苦,而是因为当玩家可能扣分时,他们所获得的分数的价值就会降低。不能被扣分的分数非常有价值——而下一次犯错时可能被扣分的分数的内生价值就会降低。

  • Loss of points: Players find this type of punishment so painful that it is relatively rare in videogames or even in traditional games and sports. Maybe it is less an issue of it being painful and more of the fact that when players can lose points, it cheapens the value of the earned points. Points that can’t be taken away are very valuable—points that could be subtracted on the next bad move have less endogenous value.

  • 缩短游戏时间:游戏中“失去一条生命”就是这种惩罚的一个例子。一些使用计时器的游戏会通过减少计时来缩短游戏时间。

  • Shortened play: “Losing a life” in a game is an example of this kind of punishment. Some games that work on a timer will shorten play by taking time off the clock.

  • 游戏结束:游戏结束了,老兄。

  • Terminated play: Game over, man.

  • 挫折:当玩家死亡后,游戏会将你带回到关卡的起点或最后一个检查点,这是一种挫折惩罚。在那些以通关为目的的游戏中,挫折是一种非常合乎逻辑的惩罚。平衡挑战在于确定检查点的确切位置,让惩罚看起来有意义,但又不至于不合理。

  • Setback: When, after dying, a game returns you to the start of a level, or to the last checkpoint, this is a setback punishment. In games that are all about proceeding to the end, a setback is a very logical punishment. The balancing challenge is to figure out exactly where the checkpoints belong to make the punishments seem meaningful, but not unreasonable.

  • 移除能力:设计师必须谨慎行事——玩家非常珍惜他们所获得的能力,而剥夺这些能力对他们来说可能不公平。在《网络创世纪》中,在战斗中阵亡的玩家会变成鬼魂。要复活,他们必须找到通往神殿的路。如果他们花太长时间到达那里,他们就会失去花费数周时间获得的宝贵技能点。许多玩家认为这种惩罚太严厉了。公平地移除能力的一种方法是暂时剥夺它们。一些游乐园设有碰碰车战斗坦克,它们会互相射击网球。坦克的两侧都有目标,如果对手用网球击中你的一个目标,你的坦克就会不受控制地旋转五秒钟,在此期间你的枪将无法使用。

  • Removal of powers: The designer must tread carefully here—players greatly treasure the powers they have earned, and to have them taken away may feel unfair to them. In Ultima Online, players who were killed in battle turned into ghosts. To come back to life, they had to find their way to a shrine. If they took too long getting there, they would lose valuable skill points that had taken weeks to earn. Many players felt this was too harsh a punishment. One way to remove powers fairly is to take them away temporarily. Some amusement parks feature bumper car battle tanks that shoot tennis balls at each other. The tanks have targets on each side, and if an opponent hits one of your targets with a tennis ball, your tank goes into an uncontrolled spin for five seconds and your gun becomes inoperable during that time.

  • 资源耗尽:金钱、货物、弹药、盾牌或生命值的损失都属于此类。这是最常见的游戏惩罚类型之一。

  • Resource depletion: Loss of money, goods, ammunition, shields, or hit points fall into this category. This is one of the most common types of game punishment.

心理学研究表明,奖励总是比惩罚更能起到强化作用。只要有可能,如果你需要鼓励玩家做某事,最好使用奖励而不是惩罚,如果可以的话。暴雪的游戏《暗黑破坏神》中一个很好的例子就是游戏中的食物采集业务。许多游戏设计师曾一度想到他们想制作一款具有“现实”食物采集系统的游戏。也就是说,如果你不采集食物,你的角色就会因为饥饿而能力减弱。暴雪实施了这一系统,发现玩家认为这很麻烦——他们必须执行相当无聊的活动,否则就会受到惩罚。因此,暴雪扭转了局面,实施了一个系统,让玩家永远不会感到饥饿,但如果他们确实吃了食物,他们的能力就会暂时提升。玩家更喜欢这个系统。通过将惩罚变成奖励,他们能够将同一项活动从消极转变为积极。

One thing that psychological study has shown is that reward is always a better tool for reinforcement than punishment. Whenever possible, if you need to encourage a player to do something, it is better to use a reward than a punishment, if you can. One great example from Blizzard’s game Diablo is the business of gathering food in games. Many game designers at one time or another get the idea that they would like to make a game with a “realistic” system of food gathering. That is, if you do not gather food, your character suffers from diminished powers because of hunger. Blizzard implemented this and found that players considered it a nuisance—they must perform a fairly boring activity or suffer a penalty. So, Blizzard turned it around and implemented a system where your player never gets hungry, but if they do eat food, they get a temporary boost in abilities. Players liked this much better. By changing a punishment into a reward, they were able to turn the same activity from a negative to a positive.

然而,当惩罚是必要时,使用多少是一个微妙的问题。在开发Toontown Online时,我们不得不面对这样一个问题:在一款轻松有趣的儿童 MMORPG 中,什么才是最严厉的惩罚。我们最终决定对“死亡”采用多种轻度惩罚,在Toontown中这被称为“变得悲伤”,因为这款游戏非常轻松,玩家没有生命值计量表,而是笑料计量表,敌人的目标不是直接杀死玩家,而是让他们悲伤到不再像卡通人物那样行事。当你的笑料计量表在Toontown中归零时,会发生以下事情:

When punishment is necessary, however, how much to use is a delicate question. When developing Toontown Online, we had to face the question of what was to be the harshest punishment in a light, fun MMORPG for kids. We ultimately decided on a combination of light punishments for “dying,” which in Toontown is called “becoming sad,” for the game is so lighthearted that players do not have a life meter, but rather a laff meter, and the enemy’s goal is not to kill the player outright, but just to make them sad enough to stop acting like a cartoon character. When your laff meter goes to zero in Toontown, these things happen:

  • 你从战场被传送回操场区域(挫折)。这个挫折很小——距离通常只有一分钟的步行路程。

  • You are teleported from the battle area back to a playground zone (setback). This setback is very minor—the distance is usually only a minute’s walk.

  • 你携带的所有物品都会消失(资源耗尽)。这也是小事一桩——这些物品很便宜,大约玩十分钟就可以再次获得。

  • All the items you are carrying disappear (resource depletion). This is also minor—the items are inexpensive and can be earned again in about ten minutes of play.

  • 你的角色悲伤地低下了头(羞愧)。

  • Your character hangs his or her head sadly (shame).

  • 大约三十秒内,你的角色会以极其缓慢的速度行走,并且无法离开操场区域或进行任何有意义的游戏(暂时失去权力)。

  • For about thirty seconds, your character walks at a painfully slow pace and is unable to leave the playground zone or engage in any meaningful gameplay (temporary removal of powers).

  • 您的笑点计(生命值)将变为零(资源耗尽),并且玩家可能需要等待它增加(在游乐场区域它会随着时间的推移而增加)然后再进行探索。

  • Your laff meter (hit points) goes to zero (resource depletion), and the player will probably want to wait for it to increase (it increases over time in a playground zone) before exploring again.

这种轻度惩罚的组合足以让玩家在战斗中保持谨慎。我们尝试了较轻的版本,结果却让战斗变得无聊——没有任何风险。我们尝试了更严厉的版本,结果却让玩家在战斗中过于谨慎。最终,我们确定了一种在鼓励玩家谨慎和冒险之间取得适当平衡的组合。

This combination of light punishments is just enough to make players use caution in battles. We tried lighter versions, and it made battles boring—there was no risk in them. We tried tougher versions, and it made players too cautious in battles. Eventually we settled on a combination that struck an appropriate balance between encouraging caution and risk in the players.

至关重要的是,游戏中的所有惩罚都是针对玩家能够理解和阻止的事情。当惩罚感觉随机且无法阻止时,它会让玩家感到完全失去控制,这是一种非常糟糕的感觉,而且玩家很快就会给游戏贴上“不公平”的标签。一旦这种情况发生,玩家就很少愿意继续玩游戏了。

It is crucial that all punishment in a game is for things that the player is able to understand and prevent. When punishment feels random and unstoppable, it makes the player feel a complete lack of control, which is a very bad feeling, and the player will quickly label the game “unfair.” Once this happens, a player is seldom willing to engage in a game further.

当然,玩家不喜欢惩罚,你必须仔细考虑是否有巧妙的方法让玩家逃避惩罚。理查德·加里奥特 (Richard Garriott) 的游戏《创世纪 3》虽然深受喜爱,但惩罚却非常严厉。这款游戏需要近百小时才能完成,如果你的四个角色在你玩游戏时死亡,你的游戏状态将被完全抹去,你必须重新开始游戏!玩家普遍认为这不公平,因此,如果你的角色濒临死亡,通常会在游戏有机会抹去已保存的游戏之前关闭电脑,从而有效地逃避惩罚。

Players dislike punishment, of course, and you must be thoughtful about whether there are tricky ways that players can avoid your punishment. Richard Garriott’s game Ultima III, though greatly beloved, contained very strict punishment. It was a game that took close to hundred hours to complete, and if your four characters perished while you were playing, your game state was completely erased, and you had to begin the game again! Players generally felt this was unfair, and as a result, it was common practice if your characters were near death to shut off the computer before the game had a chance to erase the saved game, effectively dodging the punishment.

值得一提的是,有一类玩家热爱极具挑战性的游戏,喜欢惩罚性很强的游戏(咳咳,黑暗之魂,咳咳),因为他们能为通关如此困难的游戏而感到自豪。不过,这些玩家是一个边缘群体,他们也有自己的底线。如果他们不知道如何避免惩罚,他们会很快称游戏“不公平”。

It is worth mentioning that there is a certain class of player that lives for games that are insanely challenging and loves games that have strong punishments (cough, Dark Souls, cough), because they can feel so proud about having beaten such a difficult game. These players are a fringe group, though, and even they have their limits. They will quickly call a game “unfair” if they cannot see how to prevent punishment.

平衡类型#10:自由与受控体验

Balance Type #10: Freedom vs. Controlled Experience

游戏是互动的,互动的意义在于让玩家控制或自由体验。但有多少控制权?让玩家控制一切不仅会给游戏开发者带来更多工作量;还会让玩家感到无聊!毕竟,游戏并不是要模拟现实生活,而是要比现实生活更有趣——这有时意味着要减少无聊、复杂或不必要的决定和行动。每个设计师都必须考虑的一种简单的游戏平衡是在哪里给予玩家自由以及给予多少自由。

Games are interactive, and the point of interactivity is to give the player control, or freedom, over the experience. But how much control? Giving the player control over everything is not only more work for the game developer; it can also be boring for the player! After all, a game isn’t meant to be a simulation of real life, but rather more interesting than real life—this sometimes means cutting out boring, complex, or unnecessary decisions and actions. One simple kind of game balance that every designer must consider is where to give the player freedom and how much freedom to give.

《阿拉丁的魔毯 VR 冒险》中,我们在奇迹洞穴的最后一幕遇到了一个非常困难的问题。为了让与反派贾法尔的冲突尽可能刺激,我们需要控制摄像机。但我们不想损害玩家在场景中感受到的自由。然而,在游戏测试期间观察玩家时,发现他们都想做同样的事情——飞到贾法尔站着的山顶。经过几次实验,我们做出了一个大胆的决定——我们将剥夺玩家在这个场景中的自由,这样他们就可以完美地飞上山顶与贾法尔对峙。这与其他体验形成了鲜明的对比,在其他体验中,玩家可以不受限制地飞到任何他们想飞的地方。在我们的测试中,没有一个游戏测试员注意到我们剥夺了他们的自由,因为游戏已经训练他们去任何他们想去的地方,而这个场景恰好被安排成让每个观看它的人都想要同样的东西。我们认为,在这种情况下,平衡应该落在受控体验而不是自由方面,因为这可以为玩家带来更好的体验。

In Aladdin’s Magic Carpet VR Adventure, we were faced with a very difficult problem in the final scene within the Cave of Wonders. To make the conflict with Jafar, the villain, be as exciting as possible, we needed to take control of the camera. But we didn’t want to compromise the freedom that players felt in the scene. Observing players during playtests, though, they all wanted to do the same thing—fly to the top of the hill where Jafar was standing. After several experiments, we made a bold decision—we would take away freedom from the players in this scene so they could have a perfect flight up the hill to confront Jafar. This was in sharp contrast to the rest of the experience, where players could fly wherever they wanted with no restrictions. In our tests, not a single one of our playtesters noticed we had taken away their freedom, because the game had trained them that they could go wherever they wanted and this scene happened to be arranged such that everyone who viewed it wanted the same thing. We decided that this was a case where the balance should fall on the side of controlled experience instead of freedom, because it made for a better experience for the player.

平衡类型#11:简单与复杂

Balance Type #11: Simple vs. Complex

似乎完美并非在于没有什么可以添加,而是没有什么可以减去。

—安东尼·德·圣·埃克苏佩里

It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

游戏机制的简单性和复杂性似乎非常矛盾。称游戏“简单”可能是一种批评,例如“太简单了,太无聊了”。这也可能是一种赞美:“如此简单而优雅!”复杂性也可能是一把双刃剑。游戏被批评为“过于复杂和令人困惑”,或被称赞为“丰富而错综复杂”。为了确保您的游戏具有“良好的简单性”和“良好的复杂性”,而不是坏的,我们需要研究游戏中简单性和复杂性的本质,以及如何在它们之间取得适当的平衡。

Simplicity and complexity of game mechanics can seem very paradoxical. Calling a game “simple” can be a criticism, such as “so simple it is boring.” It can also be a compliment: “so simple and elegant!” Complexity can also be a double-edged sword. Games are criticized as “overly complex and confusing” or complimented as “richly and intricately complex.” To make sure your game has the “good simplicity” and the “good complexity,” but not the bad, we need to look at the nature of simplicity and complexity in games and how to strike the right balance between them.

经典游戏因其巧妙的简单性而受到如此多的赞扬,以至于你可能会认为制作复杂的游戏是一件坏事。让我们来看看游戏中出现的不同类型的复杂性:

So much praise is heaped on classic games for being ingeniously simple that it might make you think that making a complex game is a bad thing. Let’s look at the different kinds of complexity that show up in games:

  • 固有复杂性:当游戏规则本身变得非常复杂时,我称之为固有复杂性。这种复杂性往往名声不佳。它通常是因为设计师试图模拟复杂的现实世界情况,或者因为需要向游戏中添加额外规则以平衡游戏而产生的。当你看到一个规则集有很多“例外情况”时,这通常是一个固有复杂的规则集。这样的游戏可能很难学,但有些人真的很喜欢掌握复杂的规则集。

  • Innate complexity: When the very rules of the game get very complex, I call this innate complexity. This is the kind of complexity that often gets a bad name. It generally arises either because the designer is trying to simulate a complex real-world situation or because extra rules need to be added to a game in order to balance it. When you see a ruleset with lots of “exception cases,” this is generally a ruleset that is innately complex. Games like this can be hard to learn, but some people really enjoy mastering the complex rulesets.

  • 涌现复杂性:这是每个人都称赞的一种复杂性。就像 H2O 的简单结构无数复杂的雪花出现一样,像围棋这样的游戏有非常简单的规则集,却能产生数十亿错综复杂的游戏情况。我们称之为涌现复杂性:当游戏因简单和复杂而受到称赞时,人们称赞的就是涌现复杂性。

  • Emergent complexity: This is the kind of complexity that everyone praises. Just as the simple structure of H2O lets myriad complex snowflakes appear, games like Go have a very simple rulesets that give rise to billions of intricate, complex game situations. We call this emergent complexity: when games are praised for being simple and complex at the same time, it is the emergent complexity that is being praised.

突发复杂性可能难以实现,但值得付出努力。理想情况下,可以创建一个简单的规则集,从中产生每个游戏设计师都追求的东西:平衡的惊喜。如果你能设计一款简单的游戏,让它成为源源不断的平衡惊喜的工厂,人们将在未来几个世纪玩你的游戏。要知道你是否已经做到这一点,唯一的方法就是不断玩你的游戏,不断改变它,直到惊喜开始出现。当然,使用镜头 #30突发性,也可以有所帮助。

Emergent complexity can be difficult to achieve, but is worth the effort. Ideally, one can create a simple ruleset out of which emerges the thing every game designer strives for: balanced surprises. If you can design a simple game that becomes a factory for a never-ending stream of balanced surprises, people will play your game for centuries to come. The only way to find out whether you have achieved this is to keep playing and changing your game over and over until the surprises start to come. Of course, using Lens #30: Emergence, can help, too.

那么,如果突发复杂性如此之大,为什么有人会制作天生就很复杂的游戏呢?嗯,有时你需要天生的复杂性来模拟现实世界的情况,比如重现一场历史战役。其他时候,你会添加更多的天生复杂性来更好地平衡你的游戏。国际象棋中的棋子有天生复杂的移动规则:当它们移动时,它们只能向前移动一格,进入一个未占用的空间,除非这是它们的第一步,在这种情况下它们可以移动一到两格。一个例外是当他们正在吃掉另一个棋子时;在这种情况下,它们只能沿对角线向前移动,但只能移动一格,即使这是它们的第一步。

So, if emergent complexity is so great, why would anyone make a game that is innately complex? Well, sometimes you need the innate complexity to simulate a real-world situation, such as re-creating a historical battle. Other times, you add more innate complexity to balance your game a little better. The pawns in chess have movement rules that are innately complex: when they move, they can only move forward one square, into an unoccupied space, unless it is their first move, in which case they can move one or two spaces. One exception to this is when they are capturing another piece; in that case, they can only move diagonally forward, but only one square, even if it is their first move.

这条规则具有一定的内在复杂性(内在复杂性的一些关键词:“除非”、“除了”、“例外”、“但是”和“即使”),但它是逐渐演变的,旨在确保棋子的行为平衡且有趣。事实上,这是值得的,因为这种少量的内在复杂性会发展成更多的新兴复杂性——特别是因为棋子只能向前移动但可以对角线捕获——这导致棋盘上可以形成令人着迷的复杂棋子结构,而这在更简单的规则中是不可能实现的。

This rule has some innate complexity (some keywords of innate complexity: “unless,” “except,” “exception,” “but,” and “even if”), but it is one that evolved gradually in an attempt to make sure pawns had a behavior that was well balanced and interesting. And, in fact, it is well worth it, for this small amount of innate complexity blossoms into a great deal more emergent complexity—particularly because the pawns can only move forward but capture diagonally—that leads to fascinatingly complex pawn structures that can form on the board that would never be possible with a simpler ruleset.

自然平衡与人工平衡

然而,设计师在试图平衡游戏时添加固有复杂性时必须小心谨慎。添加过多规则以获得所需行为有时被称为“人为平衡”,而不是“自然平衡”,即当期望的效果自然地从游戏中的交互中产生时。以太空侵略者为例:它具有非常自然形成的难度增加的奇妙平衡。侵略者遵循一个非常简单的规则——侵略者越少,速度越快。由此,出现了一些非常理想的特性:

Designers must be careful when adding innate complexity in an attempt to balance a game, however. Adding too many rules to get the behavior you want is sometimes called “artificial balancing” as opposed to the “natural balancing” that can come when a desired effect arises naturally from the interactions in a game. Consider Space Invaders: it has a wonderful balance of increasing difficulty that forms very naturally. The invaders adhere to a very simple rule—the fewer there are, the faster they go. From this, some very desirable properties emerge:

  1. 游戏开始时速度很慢,随着玩家成功率的提高,游戏速度会逐渐加快。

  2. The game starts slow and speeds up the more the player succeeds.

  3. 一开始击中目标很容易,但玩家成功的次数越多,击中目标就越难。

  4. It is easy to hit targets in the beginning, but the more the player succeeds, the harder it is to hit targets.

  5. 这两个属性不是天生规则的结果,而是由单一简单规则产生的良好平衡的属性。

  6. Those two properties are not the result of innate rules, but rather nicely balanced properties that emerge from a single simple rule.

优雅

我们称在复杂情况下表现稳健的简单系统为优雅。优雅是任何游戏中最令人向往的品质之一,因为它意味着你的游戏简单易学、易懂,但充满了有趣的复杂性。虽然优雅似乎有些难以言喻和难以捕捉,你可以通过计算某个游戏元素的用途数量来轻松评价其优雅程度。例如,吃豆人中的圆点有以下用途:

We call simple systems that perform robustly in complex situations elegant. Elegance is one of the most desirable qualities in any game, because it means you have a game that is simple to learn and understand but is full of interesting emergent complexity. And while elegance can seem somewhat ineffable and hard to capture, you can easily rate the elegance of a given game element by counting the number of purposes it has. For example, the dots in Pac-Man serve the following purposes:

  1. 它们为玩家设定了一个短期目标:“吃掉靠近我的点数。”

  2. They give the player a short-term goal: “Eat the dots close to me.”

  3. 它们为玩家设定了一个长期目标:“清除棋盘上的所有点”。

  4. They give the player a long-term goal: “Clear all the dots from the board.”

  5. 当玩家吃它们的时候,它们会稍微减慢玩家的速度,从而形成良好的三角关系(沿着没有点的走廊走比较安全,沿着有点的走廊走比较危险)。

  6. They slow the player down slightly when eating them, creating good triangularity (safer to go down a corridor with no dots, riskier to go down one with dots).

  7. 它们会给予玩家积分,以此作为成功的衡量标准。

  8. They give the player points, which are a measure of success.

  9. 它们为玩家提供积分,从而赢得额外的生命。

  10. They give the player points, which can earn an extra life.

这些简单的圆点却有五种不同的用途!这让它们非常优雅。你可以想象一个版本的吃豆人,其中圆点没有所有这些功能;例如,如果圆点不会减慢玩家的速度,也不会奖励积分或额外的生命,那么它们的用途就会减少,也就不会那么优雅。好莱坞有一条古老的经验法则:如果剧本中的一行没有至少两个用途,就应该删掉。许多设计师在发现他们的游戏感觉不对时,首先会想,“嗯……我需要添加什么?”通常,更好的问题是,“我需要删除什么?”我喜欢做的一件事是寻找游戏中所有只服务于一个用途的东西,并思考哪些可以结合起来。

Five different purposes, just for those simple dots! This makes them very elegant. You can imagine a version of Pac-Man where the dots did not do all those things; for example, if the dots didn’t slow the player down and didn’t award points or extra lives, they would have less purpose and be less elegant. There is an old Hollywood rule of thumb: if a line in a script doesn’t serve at least two purposes, it should be cut. Many designers, when they find their game doesn’t feel right, first think, “Hmm… what do I need to add?” Often, a better question is, “What do I need to remove?” One thing I like to do is look for all the things in my game that are only serving one purpose and think about which of them can be combined.

在开发《加勒比海盗:海盗金币之战》时,我们最初计划有两个主角:游戏开始时的友好主人,他唯一的工作就是解释如何玩;游戏结束时的反派,他唯一的目的就是进行一场戏剧性的最后战斗。这是迪士尼世界的一款短游戏(五分钟),花这么多时间介绍这两个角色感觉很奇怪,而且让它们看起来都很好也会给预算带来压力。我们开始讨论要么删掉开头的教程,要么删掉结尾的战斗,但对于一款令人满意的游戏来说,这两者都非常重要。然后我们想到了一个主意:如果开头的主人也是结尾的反派会怎么样?这不仅节省了我们的开发时间,也节省了游戏时间,因为我们只需要介绍一个角色。此外,它让角色看起来更有趣,更像一个可信的海盗(因为他欺骗了玩家),而且还创造了一个令人惊讶的情节转折!通过赋予这个角色多种用途,我们觉得它构成了一个非常优雅的游戏结构。

In working on Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold, we originally planned to have two main characters: a friendly host at the start of the game, whose only job was to explain how to play, and a villain at the end of the game, whose only purpose was to engage in a dramatic final battle. This was a short (five minutes) game for Disneyworld, and it felt strange to have to use up time to introduce both of these two characters, and it was a strain on the budget as well to make them both look good. We started talking about just cutting either the tutorial at the beginning or the battle at the end, but they were both very important for a fulfilling game. Then we hit on an idea: what if the host at the beginning also was the villain at the end? This not only saved us development time but saved game time since we only needed to introduce one character. Further, it made the character seem more interesting and a more credible pirate (since he tricks the player), and it also created a surprising plot twist! By giving this one character several purposes, it made for a game structure we felt was very elegant indeed.

特点

尽管优雅很重要,但也有过度打磨的情况。想想比萨斜塔。它明显的倾斜没有任何意义——这是一个意外的缺陷。优雅的镜头会让我们消除它的倾斜,把它变成完全笔直的比萨斜塔。但谁会想去参观呢?它可能很优雅,但会很无聊——它没有个性。想想大富翁里的代币:一顶帽子、一只鞋、一只狗、一座雕像和一艘战舰。它们与房地产游戏毫无关系。可以说,它们应该以小地主为主题。但没有人会这么做,因为这会剥夺大富翁的个性。为什么马里奥是个水管工?这与他的职业或他生活的世界几乎无关。但这种奇怪的不一致性赋予了他个性。

As important as elegance is, though, there is such a thing as honing a thing down too far. Consider the leaning tower of Pisa. Its significant tilt serves no purpose—it is an accidental flaw. The Lens of Elegance would have us remove its tilt and turn it into the perfectly straight tower of Pisa. But who would want to visit that? It might be elegant, but it would be boring—it would have no character. Think of the tokens in Monopoly: a hat, a shoe, a dog, a statue, and a battleship. They have nothing to do with a game about real estate. Arguably, they should be themed as little landlords. But no one would do that, because it would strip Monopoly of its character. Why is Mario a plumber? It has almost nothing to do with what he does or the world he lives in. But this weird inconsistency gives him character.

平衡类型#12:细节与想象力

Balance Type #12: Detail vs. Imagination

正如我们在第 10 章中讨论的那样,游戏不是体验——游戏只是在玩家头脑中产生心理模型的结构。在这样做的过程中,游戏提供了一定程度的细节,但让玩家去填补其余部分。决定到底应该提供哪些细节,哪些细节应该留给玩家的想象,这是一种不同但重要的平衡。以下是一些如何做好的技巧。

As we discussed in Chapter 10, the game is not the experience—games are simply structures that engender mental models in the mind of the player. In doing so, the games provide some level of detail but leave it to the player to fill in the rest. Deciding exactly what details should be provided and which should be left to the player’s imagination is a different but important kind of balance to strike. Here are some tips for how to do it well.

  • 只详细描述您能做好的事情:玩家拥有丰富而细致的想象力。如果您需要呈现的东西质量低于玩家的想象,请不要这样做 - 让想象力来做重担!假设您想为整个游戏播放录制的对话,但您没有足够的预算聘请优质配音演员,或者您没有足够的存储空间来存储所有对话。工程师可能会建议尝试语音合成,即让计算机为角色说话。毕竟,它很便宜,不需要存储空间,并且可以稍微调整以听起来像不同的角色,对吗?所有这些都是真的 - 但同时,它也会让每个人听起来都像机器人,除非您正在制作一款关于机器人的游戏,否则您的玩家将无法认真对待它。更便宜的替代方法是使用字幕。有些人可能会声称这意味着根本没有声音!但事实并非如此。玩家的想象力将填补一个声音 - 比您能够合成的声音好得多。这个想法适用于游戏中的几乎所有内容:风景、音效、角色、动画和特效。如果你做不好,那就试着找到一种方法,让它留给玩家的想象。

  • Only detail what you can do well: Players have rich, detailed imaginations. If there is something you need to present that is of lower quality than your players will be able to imagine, don’t do it—let the imagination do the heavy lifting! Let’s say you would like to play recorded dialog for your whole game, but you don’t have the budget for quality voice actors or you don’t have the storage space for all that dialog. An engineer might suggest trying speech synthesis, that is, letting the computer speak for the characters. After all, it is cheap, requires no storage space, and can be tuned somewhat to sound like different characters, right? All that is true—but also, it will make everyone sound like a robot, and unless you are making a game about robots, your players will not be able to take it seriously. An even cheaper alternative is to use subtitles. Some people might claim that this means there is no voice at all! But that isn’t true. The player’s imagination will fill in a voice—a voice far better than the one you will be able to synthesize. This same idea goes for just about everything in the game: scenery, sound effects, characters, animations, and special effects. If you can’t do it well, try to find a way to leave it to the player’s imagination.

  • 提供可供想象力使用的细节:玩家在玩新游戏时有很多东西需要学习——任何清晰的细节都可以让他们更容易理解游戏,这都是受欢迎的。以国际象棋游戏为例。这在很大程度上是一个有点抽象的游戏,但也有一些有趣的细节被填充。游戏设定在中世纪,棋子可以很容易地编号或做成抽象形状,但被赋予了中世纪宫廷人物的角色。它没有太多的细节——例如,国王没有名字,我们对他们的王国或政策一无所知——但这些都不重要。事实上,如果这是两个王国之间军队的真实模拟,那么移动和捕获的规则就毫无意义了!国际象棋中“国王”的重要性在于,棋子中最高的棋子的移动略微让人联想到真正的国王。他很重要,必须缓慢移动,必须小心保护。任何其他细节都可以留给玩家发挥想象力,让他们根据自己的意愿进行填充。同样,将“骑士”想象成马有助于我们记住,它们可以以其他骑士无法做到的方式在棋盘上跳跃。通过提供有助于我们的想象力更好地掌握其功能的细节,游戏对我们来说变得更容易理解。

  • Give details the imagination can use: Players have a lot to learn when they come to a new game—any clear details you can give them that make the game easier to understand will be welcome. Consider the game of chess. It is mostly a somewhat abstract game, but some interesting details have been filled in. The game is set in a medieval era, and the pieces, which easily could have been numbered or just made as abstract shapes, are given the roles of people in a medieval court. It isn’t a lot of detail—the kings, for example, don’t have names, and we know nothing about their kingdoms or their policies—but none of that matters. In fact, if this were to be a real simulation of an army between two kingdoms, the rules of movement and capture would make no sense at all! What matters about the “kings” in chess is that the tallest of the chess pieces has movements that are slightly evocative of a real king. He is important and must move slowly and must be carefully guarded. Any other details can be left to the imaginations of the players to fill in as they see fit. Similarly, picturing the “knights” as horses helps us remember that they can jump around the board in ways the others cannot. By giving details that help our imaginations better grasp their functionality, the game becomes much more accessible to us.

  • 熟悉的世界不需要太多细节:如果你正在模拟玩家可能非常熟悉的事物,例如城市街道或房屋内部,则无需模拟每个小细节——因为玩家已经知道这些地方是什么样子,如果你给他们一些相关的细节,他们会很快用想象力填补这些细节。但是,如果你的游戏目的是让玩家了解一个他们从未去过的地方,那么想象力就没什么帮助了,你会发现有必要填补大量的细节。

  • Familiar worlds do not need much detail: If you are creating a simulation of something that the player is likely to know very well, such as a city street or a house interior, you have little need to simulate every little detail—since the player already knows what these places are like, they will quickly fill them in with imagination, if you give them a few relevant details. If the point of your game, though, is to educate someone about a place they have never been before, imagination will be of little help, and you will find it necessary to fill in a great deal of detail.

  • 使用双目效果:当观众带着双目望远镜观看歌剧或体育赛事时,他们大多在赛事开始时使用它们,以便近距离观察不同的演员或表演者。一旦记住了这个近距离视图,就可以将眼镜放在一边,因为现在想象力开始发挥作用,将特写镜头放在远处微小的人物身上。视频游戏一直在复制这种效果,通常是在游戏开始时显示一个角色的特写镜头,而这个角色将在接下来的体验中一直是一个一英寸高的精灵。这是一种使用小细节来获得大量想象力的简单方法。

  • Use the binocular effect: When spectators bring binoculars to an opera or a sporting event, they use them mostly at the beginning of the event, to get a close-up view of the different players or performers. Once this close-up view has been put into memory, the glasses can be set aside, for now the imagination goes to work, filling in the close-ups on the tiny distant figures. Video games replicate this effect all the time, often by showing a close-up of a character at the beginning of the game who is going to be an inch-high sprite for the rest of the experience. It is an easy way to use a little detail to get a lot of imagination.

  • 提供激发想象力的细节:国际象棋同样是一个很好的例子。能够控制皇家军队的所有成员是人们头脑中很快就会接受的幻想——当然,这只是幻想——它只需要与现实紧密相连。为玩家提供他们可以轻松幻想的情境,让他们的想象力飞翔,各种想象的细节将很快围绕设计师提供的一个小细节具体化。

  • Give details that inspire imagination: Again, chess is a great example. To be able to control all the members of a royal army is a fantasy that the mind quickly takes to—and of course, it is a fantasy—it only has to be tied to reality by a thin thread. Giving players situations they can easily fantasize about lets their imagination take wing, and all kinds of imaginary details will quickly crystallize around one little detail that the designer provided.

我们将在第 20 章角色中进一步讨论细节与想象力之间的平衡,因为在游戏中的角色方面,决定将哪些部分留给想象力是一个关键问题。由于玩家的想象力是游戏体验发生的地方,因此想象力的镜头是一个重要的工具。

We will talk more about the balance between detail and imagination in Chapter 20: Characters, since deciding what to leave to the imagination is a key question when it comes to characters in games. Because the imagination of the player is where the gameplaying experience takes place, the Lens of Imagination is an important tool.

游戏平衡方法

Game Balancing Methodologies

我们已经讨论了很多可以在游戏中平衡的事物。现在让我们将注意力转向可以广泛应用于多种平衡类型的一般平衡方法。您可能会发现您可以将其中一些方法一起使用,但其他方法则相互矛盾——这是因为不同的设计师喜欢不同的方法。您必须进行尝试才能找到适合您的方法。

We have discussed a great number of things that can be balanced within games. Let us now turn our attention to general methods of balancing that can be broadly applied to many types of balancing. You may find you can use some of these together, but others are contradictory—this is because different designers prefer different methods. You must experiment to find the method that is right for you.

  • 使用问题陈述的视角:之前,我们讨论了在跳到解决方案之前明确陈述设计问题的重要性。不平衡的游戏是一个问题,清晰的问题陈述将大大有助于解决该问题。许多设计师在还没有想清楚问题到底是什么之前就直接提出平衡解决方案,结果把游戏弄得一团糟。

  • Use the Lens of the Problem Statement: Earlier, we discussed the importance of clearly stating your design problems before jumping to solutions. An out-of-balance game is a problem that will benefit greatly from a clear problem statement. Many designers end up making a mess of their games by jumping in with balancing solutions before they have thought clearly about what the problem really is.

  • 加倍和减半

    除非你知道什么是绰绰有余,否则你永远不会知道什么是足够。

    —威廉·布莱克,《地狱谚语》

  • Doubling and halving:

    You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

    —William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

  • 加倍和减半规则表明,当改变数值来平衡游戏时,如果只改变少量数值,则会浪费时间。相反,应先将数值加倍或减半,并朝着正确的方向发展。例如,如果一枚火箭造成 100 点伤害,而您认为这可能太多了,请不要将其减少 10 或 20,而是将伤害值设置为 50,然后看看效果如何。如果这个值太低,请尝试介于 50 和 100 之间的一个数字。通过将数值推得比您的直觉告诉您的更远,良好平衡的极限就会更快地变得清晰起来。

  • The rule of doubling and halving suggests that when changing values to balance your game, you will waste time by changing them by small amounts. Instead, start by doubling or halving your values in the direction they need to go. For example, if a rocket does 100 points of damage and you think that perhaps that is too much, don’t decrease it by 10 or 20, but rather set the damage value to 50 and see how that works. If that is too low, then try a number halfway between 50 and 100. By pushing the values farther than your intuition tells you, the limits of good balance start to become clear more quickly.

  • 这条规则通常归功于设计师 Brian Reynolds。我联系了他询问这件事,他是这样说的:

    这确实是我经常使用(并支持)的原则,但最初将其归功于杰出的席德·梅尔。我经常讲起这个故事,那是在 90 年代初期,当时我们正在开发《殖民化》,当时我还是一名年轻的设计师,他把我拉到一边(我敢肯定,当时他发现我反复更改 10% 的东西),可能是通过复述这个故事,它才与我产生了联系。这条规则的意义在于改变一些东西,这样你就能立刻感受到差异。这会让你更清楚地了解你正在改变的变量的工作原理,并避免你迷失在杂乱无章中,怀疑自己是否真的产生了效果(或者更糟的是,看到一个实际上没有实现的变化,可能是因为一系列不寻常的随机数)。

  • This rule is often attributed to designer Brian Reynolds. I contacted him to ask about it, and he had this to say:

    That’s indeed a principle I regularly use (and espouse), but the original credit for it goes to none other than the illustrious Sid Meier. I often tell the story of how he took me aside as a young designer (when he caught me repeatedly changing something by 10%, I’m sure) back in the early 90s when we were working on Colonization, and it’s probably through the retelling of the story that it got associated with me. The point of the rule is to change something so that you can actually feel the difference right away. That gives you a much clearer idea of the workings of the variable you are changing, and saves you getting lost in the weeds wondering if you have even had an effect (or worse, seeing a change where none has really been accomplished, perhaps because of an unusual series of random numbers).

  • 通过准确猜测训练你的直觉:你做的游戏设计越多,你的直觉就会越好。你可以通过练习准确猜测来训练你的直觉,以实现更好的游戏平衡。例如,如果游戏中的抛射物以每秒 10 英尺的速度移动,而你觉得速度太慢,那么就集中精力考虑确切的数字。也许你的直觉告诉你 13 太低,但 14 又有点太高。“13.7?不……也许是 13.8。是的——13.8 感觉正好。”一旦你得出了这个直觉猜测,就把它输入进去看看。你可能会发现它太低,或者太高,甚至可能完全正确。无论如何,你都已经为你的直觉提供了一些极好的数据,以供下次猜测。你也可以用微波炉体验同样的事情。很难确切知道重新加热剩菜时要花多长时间。如果你只是粗略地猜测,四舍五入到三十秒,你的猜测能力永远不会提高多少。但是,如果你每次把食物放进微波炉时都能准确猜测(1:40?太热……1:20?太冷……1:30?嗯……不,1:32 似乎正确),几个月后,你将能够做出令人惊讶的准确猜测,因为你已经训练了你的直觉。有些人认为,身体在特定时间以惊人的精确度醒来的神奇能力与潜意识进行秘密算术的能力有关。

  • Train your intuition by guessing exactly: The more game design you do, the better your intuition will become. You can train your intuition for better game balancing by getting in the practice of guessing exactly. For example, if a projectile in your game is moving at 10 feet per second and you get the feeling that is too slow, concentrate on what the exact number might be. Maybe your intuition tells you that 13 is too low, but 14 is a little too high. “13.7? No… Maybe 13.8. Yes—13.8 just feels right.” Once you have arrived at this intuitive guess, plug it in and see. You might find it is too low, or too high, or maybe even exactly right. Regardless, you will have just given your intuition some excellent data for when you guess next time. You can experience the same thing with your microwave oven. It is hard to know exactly what time to put in when reheating leftovers. And if you just make rough guesses, rounded to thirty seconds, you’ll never get much better at guessing. But if you guess exactly every time you put food in the microwave (1:40? Too hot… 1:20? Too cold… 1:30? Hmm… No, 1:32 seems right), in a couple months, you will be able to make surprisingly accurate guesses because you will have trained your intuition. Some people believe that the body’s uncanny ability to wake at specific times with startling precision is related to the subconscious mind’s ability to perform secret arithmetic.

  • 记录你的模型:你应该写下你认为要平衡的事物之间的关系。这将有助于理清你的想法,并为你提供一个框架来记录游戏平衡实验的结果。

  • Document your model: You should write down what you think the relationships are between the things you are balancing. This will help clarify your thoughts and give you a framework to record the results of your game balancing experiments.

  • 在调整游戏时调整模型:正如本章开头附近的“非对称游戏”部分所述,在尝试平衡游戏时,您将开发出一个关于游戏中事物如何关联的更好的模型。对于您尝试的每次平衡实验,您不仅应该注意它是否改善了您的游戏,还应该注意实验是否符合您的游戏机制关联模型。然后您应该调整您的如果结果与您的预期不符,请重新检查模型。写下您的观察结果和模型将大有帮助!

  • Tune your model as you tune your game: As was mentioned in the “asymmetrical game” section near the start of this chapter, as you experiment with balancing your game, you will develop a better model about how things are related within the game. With each balancing experiment that you try, you should note not only whether it improved your game but whether the experiment matches your model for how game mechanics are related. Then you should alter your model if it doesn’t match what you expected. Writing down your observations and your model helps a great deal!

  • 平衡计划:您知道您必须平衡游戏。在设计游戏时,您可能对需要平衡的方面有很好的了解。利用这一点,并加入可以轻松更改需要平衡的值的系统。如果您可以在游戏运行时更改这些值,那就更好了。更好的方法是拥有一个内容管理系统,让您在游戏发布后继续平衡游戏。在进行游戏平衡时,循环规则会完全发挥作用,在现代在线游戏发行世界中,您可以(并且必须!)在游戏发布后继续循环。

  • Plan to balance: You know you are going to have to balance your game. As you are designing it, you might have a pretty good idea of what aspects of it you will need to balance. Take advantage of that, and put in systems that make it easy to change the values you expect to have to balance. If you can change these values while the game is running, that is even better. Better still is to have a content management system that lets you continue to balance the game even after it ships. The Rule of the Loop is in full force while you are game balancing, and in the modern world of online game distribution, you can (and must!) keep looping well after the game has shipped.

  • 让玩家自己做:偶尔,你会遇到有这样绝妙想法的设计师:“让我们让玩家平衡游戏吧!这样他们就可以选择适合自己的价值观!”这在理论上听起来不错(谁不想要一款为个性化挑战量身定制的游戏呢?)但在实践中往往会失败,因为玩家存在利益冲突。是的,他们希望游戏给他们挑战,但与此同时,他们希望尽可能轻松地赢得游戏!当所有价值观都以这种方式设置时(看看我!我有一百万条命!),这是一种快速的乐趣,但很快就会变得无聊,因为没有挑战了。最糟糕的是,从一款功能过强的游戏回到合理的游戏平衡有点像试图戒掉海洛因——缺乏力量会让普通游戏感觉受限和乏味。大富翁的例子再次给我们提供了很好的启示:按照玩家制定的规则(停在免费停车位上可获得大奖)玩游戏的人会抱怨游戏时间太长,但如果你说服他们按照官方规则(没有大奖)玩游戏,他们通常会抱怨游戏似乎没有以前那么刺激。有时让玩家平衡游戏是个好主意(通常是通过难度级别),但大多数情况下,平衡游戏最好留给设计师。

  • Let the players do it: Every once in a while, you will run into a designer who has this bright idea: “Let’s let the players balance the game! That way they can pick the values that are right for them!” This sounds good in theory (who wouldn’t want a game that was custom tailored for a personalized level of challenge?) but tends to fail in practice because players have a conflict of interest. Yes, they want the game to give them a challenge, but at the same time, they want to win the game as easily as they can! And when all the values are set that way (Look at me! I have a million lives!), it is a quick rush of fun that quickly gets boring since there is no challenge left. Worst of all, returning from an overpowered game to a reasonable game balance is a little like trying to kick heroin—the lack of power makes the ordinary game feel limiting and dull. The Monopoly example serves us well again: people who play with the player-created rule that you get a jackpot when you land on free parking complain that the game goes on too long, but if you convince them to play by the official rules (that have no such jackpots), they often complain that it seems less exciting than the old way. There are times when letting the players balance the game is a good idea (usually through difficulty levels), but mostly, balancing the game is better left to the designers.

平衡游戏经济

Balancing Game Economies

任何游戏中最难平衡的结构之一就是“游戏经济”。游戏经济的定义很简单。我们之前谈到了如何平衡有意义的决策,而这正是任何经济的定义——两个有意义的决策,即:

One of the more challenging structures to balance in any game is a “game economy.” The definition of a game economy is simple. We talked earlier about how to balance meaningful decisions, and that is just what any economy is defined by—two meaningful decisions, namely,

  • 我将如何赚钱?

  • How will I earn money?

  • 我将如何花我所赚到的钱?

  • How will I spend the money I have earned?

现在,在这种情况下,“金钱”可以是任何可以换取其他东西的东西。如果你的游戏让玩家获得技能点,然后将其用于不同的技能,那么这些技能点就是金钱。重要的是玩家拥有前面描述的两种选择——这就是经济的构成。有意义的经济是由这两种选择的深度和意义构成的。这两种选择通常是循环的,因为玩家通常会选择能帮助他们赚更多钱的方式花钱,这会给他们更多花钱的机会,等等。这种赚钱和花钱的交替模式对玩家很有吸引力,并以多种形式出现,这是一种交替的棘轮,推动玩家前进,就像用两条腿走路一样。

Now, “money” in this context can be anything that can be traded for something else. If your game lets players earn skill points and then spend them on different skills, those skill points are money. What is important is that players have the two choices described earlier—that is what makes an economy. What makes for a meaningful economy is the depth and meaning in those two choices. And these two choices are usually in a loop, because usually players spend their money in ways that will help them earn more money, which will give them more opportunities to spend money, and so on. This alternating pattern of earning and spending is very appealing to players and shows up in many guises, a sort of alternating ratchet that moves players forward, like walking on two legs.

平衡经济,特别是在大型在线多人游戏中,玩家可以相互购买或出售物品,这可能非常困难,因为你实际上正在平衡我们已经讨论过的许多事情:

Balancing economies, particularly in large online multiplayer games, where players can buy or sell items to each other, can be very difficult, because you are really balancing many of the things we have already discussed at once:

  • 公平性:是否有玩家通过购买某些东西或以某种方式赚钱而获得不公平的优势?

  • Fairness: Do any players get unfair advantage by buying certain things or earning a certain way?

  • 挑战:玩家是否可以购买某些让他们觉得游戏太简单的物品?赚钱购买他们想要的东西是否太难?

  • Challenge: Can players buy something that makes the game too easy for them? Is earning money to buy what they want too hard?

  • 选择:玩家是否有足够的方式去赚钱?花钱?

  • Choices: Do players have enough ways to earn money? To spend money?

  • 机会:赚钱更多是基于技能还是基于机会?

  • Chance: Is earning money more skill based or chance based?

  • 合作:玩家能否以有趣的方式汇集资金?他们能否合谋利用经济中的“漏洞”?

  • Cooperation: Can players pool their funds in interesting ways? Can they collude in a way that exploits “holes” in the economy?

  • 时间:赚钱的时间太长,还是赚得太快?

  • Time: Does it take too long to earn money, or is it earned too quickly?

  • 奖励: 赚钱有奖励吗?花钱有奖励吗?

  • Rewards: Is it rewarding to earn money? To spend money?

  • 惩罚:惩罚如何影响玩家赚钱和花钱的能力?

  • Punishment: How do punishments affect a player’s ability to earn and spend money?

  • 自由:玩家是否可以购买自己想要的东西并以自己想要的方式赚钱?

  • Freedom: Can players buy what they want and earn the way they want?

平衡游戏经济的方法有很多种,从控制游戏创造的金钱数量到控制赚钱和花钱的不同方式。但平衡游戏经济的目标与平衡任何其他游戏机制的目标相同——确保玩家能够享受有趣且具有挑战性的游戏。

There are many different ways to balance economies in games, from controlling how much money is created by the game to controlling the different ways to earn and spend it. But the goals of balancing a game economy are the same as balancing any other game mechanics—to be sure the players can enjoy a fun, challenging game.

动态游戏平衡

Dynamic Game Balancing

充满梦想的年轻游戏设计师经常谈到他们希望创建一个能够“根据玩家的技能水平进行调整”的系统。也就是说,如果游戏对玩家来说太简单或太难,游戏就会检测到这一点并改变难度,直到达到适合玩家的挑战水平。这是一个美丽的梦想。但这个梦想充满了一些令人惊讶的问题。

Dreamy young game designers frequently speak of their desire to create a system that will “adjust to the player’s skill level on the fly.” That is, if the game is too easy or too difficult for a player, the game will detect this and change the difficulty until it is at the right level of challenge for the player. And this is a beautiful dream. But it is a dream that is rife with some surprising problems.

  • 它破坏了游戏世界的现实性:玩家在某种程度上希望相信他们所处的游戏世界是真实的。但如果他们知道所有对手的能力都不是绝对的,而是相对于玩家的技能水平,那么就会破坏这些对手是需要应对和掌握的固定挑战的幻想。

  • It spoils the reality of the world: Players want to believe, on some level, that the game world they are playing in is real. But if they know that all of their opponents’ abilities are not absolute, but relative to the player’s skill level, it damages the illusion that these opponents are fixed challenges to be met and mastered.

  • 它是可以被利用的:如果玩家知道当他们玩得不好时游戏会变得更容易,他们可能会选择玩得不好只是为了让游戏的即将到来的部分更容易通过,完全违背了自我平衡系统的目的。

  • It is exploitable: If players know the game will get easier when they play badly, they may choose to play badly just to make an upcoming part of the game easy to get through, completely defeating the purpose of the self-balancing system.

  • 玩家通过练习不断进步: PlayStation 2 的《绿巨人》游戏设定,如果玩家被敌人击败的次数超过一定次数,那么敌人就会变得更容易对付,这引起了一些争议。许多玩家对此感到被侮辱,而其他人则感到失望——他们希望继续练习,直到能够掌握挑战,但游戏剥夺了这种乐趣。

  • Players improve with practice: The Incredible Hulk for the PlayStation 2 caused some controversy by making the enemies get easier if you were defeated by them more than a certain number of times. Many players felt insulted by this, and others felt disappointed—they wanted to keep practicing until they could master the challenge, and the game took away that pleasure.

这并不是说动态游戏平衡是一条死路。我只是想指出,实现这样的系统并不那么简单。我怀疑,这一领域的进步将涉及一些非常聪明、违反直觉的想法。

This is not to say that dynamic game balancing is a dead end. I only mean to point out that implementing such a system is not so straightforward. I suspect that advances in this area will involve some very clever, counterintuitive ideas.

总体情况

The Big Picture

游戏平衡是一个广度和深度都很大的话题。我试图涵盖尽可能多的要点,但每个游戏都有需要平衡的独特之处,因此不可能涵盖所有内容。使用平衡镜头来寻找其他镜头可能遗漏的任何平衡问题。

Game balancing is a big topic both in breadth and depth. I have tried to cover as many major points as possible, but each game has unique things that need to be balanced, so it would be impossible to cover everything. Use the Lens of Balance to look for any balancing problems the other lenses might have missed.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 游戏机制:高级游戏设计(作者 Ernest Adams 和 Joris Dormans)。我在上一章中提到过这一点,但我将在这里再次提及,因为其中很多内容都是关于游戏平衡的实用技术。

  • Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans. I mentioned this in the last chapter, but I’ll mention it here again, since so much of it is about practical techniques for game balancing.

  • 设计细节:将狙击步枪的射击间隔时间从 0.5 秒更改为 0.7 秒(适用于 Halo 3),作者:Jaime Griesemer。这是 Jaime 在 2010 年游戏开发者大会上发表的演讲,他直面了这样一个事实:平衡微小的值会对游戏玩法产生巨大影响。

  • Design in Detail: Changing the Time between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 by Jaime Griesemer. This was a talk that Jaime gave at GDC 2010 that deals head on with the fact that balancing tiny values can have a tremendous impact on gameplay.

第十四

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

游戏机制支持谜题

Game Mechanics Support Puzzles



14.1

FIGURE

14.1

谜题是构成许多游戏关键部分的奇妙机制。有时谜题非常显眼,有时则与玩法紧密相关而难以发现。但所有谜题都有一个共同点,那就是它们都会让玩家停下来思考。通过透镜#42头部和手来看,谜题绝对属于“头部”一侧。可以说,只要玩家在游戏过程中停下来思考,他们就是在解决谜题。谜题和游戏之间的关系很微妙。在第 4 章游戏中,我们讨论了每个游戏都是“一种以好玩的方式解决问题的活动”。谜题也是解决问题的活动 —— 这使得它们成为游戏吗?在本章中,我们将探讨如何制作好的谜题,以及将谜题融入游戏的最佳方法。但首先,我们也应该停下来思考,以更好地理解谜题与游戏的关系。

Puzzles are wonderful mechanisms that form key parts of many games. Sometimes they are very visible, and other times they are so enmeshed into the gameplay as to make them hidden, but what all puzzles have in common is that they make the player stop and think. Examining with Lens #42: Head and Hands, puzzles are firmly on the “head” side. It can be argued that any time a player stops during gameplay to think, they are solving a puzzle. The relationship between puzzles and games is tricky. In Chapter 4: Game, we talked about how every game is “a problem-solving activity, approached playfully.” Puzzles, too, are problem-solving activities—does this make them games? In this chapter, we will explore how to make good puzzles, and what the best ways are to incorporate puzzles into games. But first, we too should stop and think to better understand the puzzle–game relationship.

谜中之谜

The Puzzle of Puzzles

关于谜题是否“真正的游戏”,存在很多争论。当然,谜题通常是游戏的一部分,但这是否意味着它们就是游戏?从某种意义上说,谜题只是“有趣的问题”。如果你回过头来回顾第 4 章,你会发现,令人惊讶的是,“有趣的问题”符合我们列出的游戏定义的许多条件。那么,也许每个谜题实际上都是一种游戏?

There is much debate about whether puzzles are “really games.” Certainly, puzzles are often part of games, but does that mean they are games? In a sense, puzzles are just “fun problems.” If you go back and review Chapter 4, you will find that, surprisingly, “fun problem” meets the many qualifications that we listed for the definition of a game. So, maybe each puzzle is really a kind of game?

人们对于将解谜游戏称为游戏感到困扰。拼图游戏和填字游戏都不像游戏。您会将魔方称为游戏吗?可能不会。那么,我们倾向于将其排除在游戏定义之外,而解谜游戏缺少什么呢?首先,大多数解谜游戏都是单人游戏,但这很难成为反对意见——从单人纸牌到《最终幻想》,我们立即将其归类为游戏的许多游戏都是单人游戏。它们仍然有冲突;冲突只存在于玩家和系统之间,而不是玩家和玩家之间。

Something bothers people about calling puzzles games. A jigsaw puzzle doesn’t feel like a game nor does a crossword puzzle. Would you call Rubik’s Cube a game? Probably not. So what is missing from puzzles that we are inclined to exclude them from our definition of games? First of all, most puzzles are just single player, but that can hardly be an objection—many things we immediately classify as games, from solitaire to Final Fantasy, are single player. They still have conflict; it is just between the player and system, not between player and player.

年轻的 Chris Crawford 曾大胆宣称,谜题实际上并不具有互动性,因为它们不会主动响应玩家。这种说法值得怀疑,部分原因是有些谜题确实会响应玩家,尤其是电子游戏中的谜题。有人认为,任何既有结局又能保证对总是输入相同内容的玩家给出相同输出的游戏实际上都是谜题,而不是游戏。这意味着许多基于故事的冒险游戏,例如ZorkZeldaUncharted,可能根本不能算是游戏,而只能算是谜题。但这听起来并不属实。

A young Chris Crawford once made the bold statement that puzzles are not even really interactive, since they don’t actively respond to the player. This is questionable, partly because some puzzles do indeed respond to the player, particularly puzzles in videogames. Some people have suggested that any game that both has an ending and is guaranteed to give the same output to a player who always gives the same input is really a puzzle, and not a game. This would mean many story-based adventure games, such as Zork, Zelda, or Uncharted, might not qualify as games at all, but only as puzzles. But this doesn’t really ring true.

也许拼图有点像企鹅。第一批看到企鹅的探险家一定很惊讶,可能不知道如何对它们进行分类,他们会想“嗯,它们看起来有点像鸟,但它们不可能是鸟,因为鸟会飞。它们一定是别的东西。”但进一步的研究得出的结论是企鹅确实是鸟:只是不会飞的鸟。那么拼图不能做什么呢?

Perhaps puzzles are kind of like penguins. The first explorers to see penguins must have been kind of surprised, and probably at a loss as to how to classify them, thinking something like “Well, they kind of look like birds, but they can’t be birds, because birds can fly. They must be something else.” But further examination leads to the conclusion that penguins are indeed birds: just birds that can’t fly. So what is it that puzzles can’t do?

拼图大师 Scott Kim 曾经说过:“拼图很有趣,而且有正确答案。”讽刺的是,一旦你找到了正确答案,拼图就不再有趣了。或者就像 Emily Dickinson 曾经说过的那样:

Puzzlemaster Scott Kim once said that “A puzzle is fun, and has a right answer.” The irony of that is that once you find that right answer, the puzzle ceases to be fun. Or as Emily Dickinson once put it:

我们可以猜的谜语

我们迅速鄙视——

没有什么是陈旧的

正如昨天的惊喜。

The Riddle we can guess

We speedily despise—

Not anything is stale so long

As Yesterday’s surprise.

人们之所以将益智游戏称为游戏,真正让人感到困扰的是,它们无法重复玩。一旦你想出了最佳策略,你每次都可以解决难题,这不再有趣。游戏通常不是这样的。大多数游戏都具有足够的动态元素,每次玩游戏时,你都会再次面临一组需要解决的新问题。有时这是因为你有一个聪明的人类对手(跳棋、国际象棋、西洋双陆棋等),有时是因为游戏能够为你生​​成许多不同的挑战,无论是通过不断提高的目标(创下新的高分记录),还是通过某种丰富的挑战生成机制(单人纸牌、魔方、俄罗斯方块等)。

The thing that really seems to bother people about calling puzzles games is that they are not replayable. Once you figure out the best strategy, you can solve the puzzle every time, and it is no longer fun. Games are not usually this way. Most games have enough dynamic elements that each time you play you are confronted again with a new set of problems to solve. Sometimes this is because you have an intelligent human opponent (checkers, chess, backgammon, etc.), and sometimes it is because the game is able to generate lots of different challenges for you, either through ever-advancing goals (setting a new high score record) or through some kind of rich challenge-generation mechanism (solitaire, Rubik’s Cube, Tetris, etc.)

第 12 章平衡中,我们为单一策略每次都能击败游戏的情况命名:“主导策略”。当游戏具有主导策略时,它不会停止成为游戏;只是不是一款很好的游戏。孩子们喜欢井字游戏,直到他们找到主导策略。到那时,井字游戏的谜题就解决了,游戏也不再有趣。通常,我们会说具有主导策略的游戏很糟糕,当然,除非游戏的整个意义在于找到那个主导策略。这引出了一个有趣的谜题定义:

In Chapter 12: Balance, we gave a name to the situation when a single strategy will defeat a game every time: a “dominant strategy.” When a game has a dominant strategy, it doesn’t cease to be a game; it just isn’t a very good game. Children like tic-tac-toe until they find the dominant strategy. At that point, the puzzle of tic-tac-toe has been solved, and the game ceases to be interesting. Usually, we say games that have dominant strategies are bad, unless, of course, the whole point of the game is to find that dominant strategy. This leads to an interesting definition of a puzzle:

谜题是一种采用主导策略的游戏。

A puzzle is a game with a dominant strategy.

从这个角度来看,谜题只是一种不耐玩的游戏,就像企鹅是不会飞的鸟一样。这就是为什么谜题和游戏的核心都是解决问题——谜题只是微型游戏,其目标是找到主导策略。

From this point of view, puzzles are just games that aren’t fun to replay, just as penguins are birds that cannot fly. This is why both puzzles and games have problem solving at their core—puzzles are just miniature games whose goal is to find the dominant strategy.

拼图不是已经消亡了吗?

Aren’t Puzzles Dead?

当我与学生讨论谜题的重要性时,总会有人问:“谜题难道不过时吗?我的意思是,二十年前,它们确实是冒险游戏的一部分,但现代电子游戏是基于动作,而不是谜题,对吧?此外,网络上有各种攻略,每个人都可以轻松找到谜题的答案——那么谜题的意义何在?”

When I discuss the importance of puzzles with students, there is always someone who asks, “Aren’t puzzles old fashioned? I mean, sure they were a part of adventure games twenty years ago, but modern videogames are based on action, not puzzles, right? Besides, with all the walk-throughs on the web, everyone can get the answers to puzzles easily—so what’s the point?”

这种观点是可以理解的。在 20 世纪 80 年代甚至 90 年代初期,冒险游戏(Zork、Myst、Monkey Island、King's Quest 等)非常流行,这些游戏通常具有非常明确的谜题。随着主机游戏的兴起,那些更倾向于“手”端、远离“头脑”端的游戏变得更受欢迎。但谜题消失了吗?没有。请记住 - 谜题是任何让你停下来思考的东西,智力挑战可以为动作游戏增添重要的多样性。随着游戏设计师的经验越来越丰富,游戏开发出更流畅和连续的控制方案,谜题变得不那么明确,更多地融入了游戏玩法的结构中。现代游戏不再完全停止游戏并要求玩家在继续之前滑动拼图碎片,而是将谜题融入其环境。

And this is an understandable point of view. In the 1980s and even early 1990s, adventure games (Zork, Myst, Monkey Island, King’s Quest, etc.) were very popular, and these usually featured very explicit puzzles. With the rise of console gaming, games that slid a bit more toward the “hands” side of the spectrum and away from the “head” side became more popular. But did the puzzles go away? No. Remember—a puzzle is anything that makes you stop and think, and mental challenges can add significant variety to an action-based game. As game designers grew more experienced and games developed more fluid and continuous control schemes, the puzzles became less explicit and more woven into the fabric of the gameplay. Instead of completely stopping play and demanding that the player slides around pieces of a puzzle before they could continue, modern games integrate the puzzles into their environment.

例如,1992 年发行的热门游戏《第七位客人》中的谜题虽然有趣,但往往完全不协调。当你走过一所房子时,你会发现架子上有罐子,你需要重新排列它们,让上面的字母组成一个句子。然后你会突然发现一个巨大的棋盘,并被告知要继续游戏,你必须找到一种方法来交换所有黑色棋子和白色棋子的位置。然后你会通过望远镜观察并做一个关于用线连接行星的谜题。

For example, The 7th Guest, a popular game released in 1992, featured puzzles that, though interesting, were often completely incongruous. While walking through a house, you find cans on a shelf, and you need to rearrange them so that the letters on them form a sentence. Then you would suddenly find a giant chessboard and be told that to continue in the game, you must find a way to exchange the positions of all the black pieces and the white pieces. Then you would look through a telescope and do a puzzle about connecting planets with lines.

相比之下,《塞尔达传说:风之杖》虽然有许多谜题,但都巧妙地融入了游戏环境。面对岩浆河时,你必须想办法以正确的方式投掷水罐,这样才能过河。当你身处地牢,门由一系列复杂的开关打开和关闭时,你必须想办法使用地牢中的物品(雕像等)来拨动开关,这样你才能成功通过所有门。其中一些相当复杂;例如,地牢中的某些敌人在光照时会瘫痪。要打开门,你必须将敌人引诱到正确的开关上,然后射出燃烧的箭,距离足够近,使它们瘫痪,让门保持打开状态,这样你就可以跑出去。但在所有情况下,谜题元素都是环境的自然组成部分,解决谜题的目标也是玩家角色的直接目标。

Contrast that to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which has many puzzles but smoothly integrates them into environments in the game. When confronted with a river of lava, you have to figure out how to throw water jugs in the right pattern so that you can cross the river. When you are in a dungeon where the doors are opened and closed by a complex series of switches, you must figure out how to use items found in the dungeon (statues, etc.) to flip the switches so you can successfully get through all the doors. Some of these are quite complex; for example, some enemies in the dungeon are paralyzed when light falls on them. To get the doors open, you must lure the enemies onto the right switches and then shoot flaming arrows near enough to paralyze them to keep the door open so you can run out. But in all cases, the puzzle elements are natural parts of the environment, and the goals of solving the puzzle are direct goals of the player’s avatar.

这种从显性、不协调的谜题到隐性、整合良好的谜题的逐渐变化,并不是因为游戏玩家的口味发生了变化,而是因为游戏设计师的技能已经成熟。使用镜头 #49优雅来观察《第七位客人》《塞尔达传说》的谜题,并注意隐性谜题比显性谜题有更多的用途。

This gradual change from explicit, incongruous puzzles to implicit, well-integrated ones is less because of a change in the tastes of the gaming audience and more because game designers have matured in their skills. Look at The 7th Guest and Zelda puzzles with Lens #49: Elegance, and notice how many more purposes the implicit puzzle serves as opposed to the explicit one.

我们举的两个例子都是冒险游戏。其他游戏类型可以包含谜题吗?当然可以。当你玩格斗游戏时,你必须停下来思考哪种策略对付特定对手最有效,你就是在解决一个谜题。当你玩赛车游戏时,你试图弄清楚在赛道上哪里使用涡轮增压器以在一分钟内完成比赛,你就是在解决一个谜题。当你玩第一人称射击游戏时,你考虑应该按照什么顺序射击敌人才能使自己受到的伤害最小,你就是在解决一个谜题。

Our two examples were adventure games. Can other genres include puzzles? Absolutely. When you play a fighting game and you have to stop and think about which strategies are going to work best against a particular opponent, you are solving a puzzle. When you play a racing game and are trying to figure out where on the track to use your turbo booster to finish the race in less than a minute, you are solving a puzzle. When you play a first-person shooter and you think about which order you should shoot the enemies so that you take the least damage, you are solving a puzzle.

但是网络上的攻略又如何呢?它们不是永远毁掉了电子游戏谜题吗?并没有。我们将在下一节中看到原因。

But what about walk-throughs on the web? Haven’t they spoiled videogame puzzles forever? They have not. We’ll see why in the next section.

好谜题

Good Puzzles

好吧,谜题无处不在。我们真正关心的是如何设计出好的谜题来改善我们的游戏。以下是谜题设计的十条原则,它们适用于任何类型的游戏。

Okay—so, puzzles are everywhere. The thing we really care about is how to create good puzzles that will improve our games. Here are ten principles of puzzle design that can be useful in any game genre.

拼图原则 1:让目标容易理解

Puzzle Principle #1: Make the Goal Easily Understood

为了让人们对你的谜题感兴趣,他们必须知道他们应该做什么。考虑一下这个谜题:

To get people interested in your puzzle, they have to know what they are supposed to do. Consider this puzzle:



14.2

FIGURE

14.2

仅从外观来看,根本无法看出其目标是什么。是颜色匹配吗?是拆开它吗?还是重新组装起来?很难确定。与此谜题对比一下:

Just looking at it, it isn’t at all obvious what the goal is. Is it about color matching? Is the goal to take it apart? Or maybe to put it back together? It isn’t easy to tell for sure. Contrast that to this puzzle:



14.3

FIGURE

14.3

几乎任何人看到这个都能看出目标是将圆盘从轴上取下来,即使他们以前从未见过。目标很明确。

Almost anyone can look at this and tell that the goal is to get the disk off of the shaft, even though they have never seen this before. The goal is clear.

电子游戏中的谜题也是如此。如果玩家不确定自己应该做什么,他们很快就会失去兴趣,除非弄清楚做起来其实很有趣。而且有很多谜题,弄清楚做什么也是谜题的一部分。但你必须小心这类谜题——一般来说,只有铁杆谜题迷才会喜欢这种挑战。想想孩之宝的《复仇女神》 ( Nemesis Factor)的命运吧。这个巧妙的谜题因其创意、有趣和具有挑战性而受到谜题爱好者的推崇——它用一百个谜题挑战玩家,难度逐渐增加。它的设计令人难以置信,孩之宝当然希望他们能再得到一个魔方。但遗憾的是,它卖得不好。为什么?它违反了我们的第一个谜题原则——目标不明确。它奇特的阶梯式设计让人很难猜出目标,甚至很难通过看一眼就猜出你会如何与它互动。即使在你购买了它之后,游戏仍然很少告诉你你应该做什么。玩家必须弄清楚每个谜题的目标,然后尝试解决它,而一百个谜题中的每一个都有不同的目标。这是硬核解谜爱好者喜欢的东西,但普通观众却会觉得很沮丧,因为这是一个非常开放式的问题,很少能反馈你是否走在正确的轨道上。

The same thing applies to puzzles in videogames. If players aren’t sure what they are supposed to do, they will quickly lose interest, unless figuring out what to do is actually fun. And there are a lot of puzzles where figuring out what to do is part of the puzzle. But you must use caution with these kinds of puzzles—generally, only die-hard puzzle fans like that kind of challenge. Consider the fate of Hasbro’s Nemesis Factor. This ingenious puzzle is much revered by puzzle fanatics for being creative, interesting, and challenging—it challenges the player with one hundred puzzles, gradually increasing in difficulty. Its design is incredible, and Hasbro surely hoped they might have another Rubik’s Cube on their hands. But sadly, it did not sell well. Why? It violated our first puzzle principle—the goal was not clear. Its curious stair-step design made it difficult to guess the goal, or even guess how you might interact with it at all, just by looking at it. Even after you have purchased it, the game still tells you little about what you are supposed to do. The player must figure out the goal of each puzzle and then try to solve it, and each of the one hundred puzzles has a different goal. It’s the sort of thing that hardcore puzzle freaks love, but a more general audience finds frustrating, because it is a very open-ended kind of problem that gives little feedback about whether you are on the right track.

当设计谜题时,一定要通过镜头#32目标来查看它们,并确保你向玩家清楚地说明了你想让他们了解的谜题目标。

When designing puzzles, make sure to view them through Lens #32: Goals, and make sure that you are clear to the player about what you want them to know about the goals of your puzzle.

拼图原则 #2:让入门变得简单

Puzzle Principle #2: Make It Easy to Get Started

一旦玩家理解了谜题的目标,他们就需要开始解决它。有些谜题的开始方法非常明确。以 Sam Loyd 著名的“15 谜题”为例,其目标是将方块滑回到从 1 到 15 的数字顺序。

Once a player understands the goal of your puzzle, then they need to get started solving it. With some puzzles, it is quite clear how to begin. Consider Sam Loyd’s famous “15 Puzzle,” whose goal is to slide the tiles back into numerical order from 1 to 15.



14.4

FIGURE

14.4

虽然解决这个谜题的一系列步骤并不明显,但对于大多数玩家来说,如何开始操作它是非常清楚的。相比之下,这个谜题的目标是找出每个字母代表哪个数字:

Although the series of moves to solve the puzzle is not obvious, how you would get started manipulating it is very clear to most players. Contrast that to this puzzle, where the goal is to figure out which digit each letter represents:



14.5

FIGURE

14.5

和 15 号谜题一样,目标非常明确。然而,大多数玩家都不知道该如何开始解决这样的谜题。硬核解谜者可能会开始一段漫长的反复试验,以找出解决问题的方法,但大多数玩家会因为“太难”而放弃。

Like the 15 Puzzle, the goal is very clear. However, most players are at a complete loss as to how to begin solving a puzzle like this. Hardcore puzzle solvers will likely begin a lengthy trial-and-error session to figure out how they might approach it, but most players will just abandon it as “too hard.”

Scott Kim 的另一句至理名言是:“要设计出好的拼图,首先要制作出好的玩具。”在设计拼图时,采用镜头 #17玩具是有意义的,因为好的玩具会让人清楚地知道如何操作它们。不仅如此,玩家也会被吸引去操作它们。这是魔方如此成功的原因之一:即使是那些无意尝试解决魔方的人也想体验触摸、握住和扭转它的感觉。

Another piece of wisdom from Scott Kim is, “To design a good puzzle, first build a good toy.” And it makes sense to pull out Lens #17: The Toy, when designing your puzzle, for good toys make it obvious how to manipulate them. More than that, the player is drawn toward manipulating them. This is one of the things that made Rubik’s Cube so successful: even someone who has no intention of trying to solve the puzzle wants to see what it feels like to touch it, hold it, and twist it.

拼图原则3:给人一种进步的感觉

Puzzle Principle #3: Give a Sense of Progress

谜语和谜题有什么区别?在大多数情况下,最大的区别在于进度。谜语只是一个需要答案的问题。谜题也需要答案,但通常需要操纵一些东西,以便你能够看到或感觉到自己一点一点地接近解决方案。玩家喜欢这种进步感——它让他们有希望找到答案。谜语不是这样——你只需要思考,也许开始猜测,这些猜测要么正确,要么错误。在早期的电脑冒险游戏中,谜语很常见,因为它们很容易融入游戏——但它们给玩家带来的“石墙”是如此令人沮丧,以至于它们在现代冒险游戏中几乎不存在。

What is the difference between a riddle and a puzzle? In most cases, the big difference is progress. A riddle is just a question that demands an answer. A puzzle also demands an answer but frequently involves manipulating something so that you can see or feel yourself getting closer to the solution, bit by bit. Players like this sense of progress—it gives them hope that they may actually arrive at an answer. Riddles are not this way—you just have to think and think, and maybe start making guesses, which are either right or wrong. In early computer adventure games, riddles were frequently encountered, since they were so easy to put into a game—but the “stone wall” they give to the player is so frustrating that they are virtually absent from modern adventure games.

但有一种方法可以将谜语变成谜题——这就是我们称之为“二十个问题”的游戏。在这个游戏中,一个玩家思考一件事或一个人,另一个玩家可以问二十个是非问题,以试图了解第一个玩家在想什么。

But there is a way to turn a riddle into a puzzle—it’s a game we call “Twenty Questions.” This is the game where one player thinks of a thing or a person and the other player gets to ask twenty yes/no questions in an attempt to learn what the first player is thinking of.

Twenty Questions 游戏的一大优点是玩家可以获得进步感。通过提出问题逐渐缩小可能答案的范围,他们可以越来越接近解决方案——毕竟,2 20大于一百万,这意味着 20 个精心设计的是非问题可以从一百万种可能性中得出一个答案。当玩家在玩 Twenty Questions 时感到沮丧时,是因为他们觉得自己离答案越来越远了。

The great thing about the game of Twenty Questions is the sense of progress that a player gets. By using their questions to gradually narrow down the space of possible answers, they can get closer and closer to a solution—after all, 220 is over one million, and this means that twenty well-crafted yes/no questions could home in on one answer out of a million possibilities. When players get frustrated playing Twenty Questions, it is because they feel like they aren’t getting any closer to an answer.

让玩家坚持不懈地尝试解决魔方的原因之一是它给人的进步感。渐渐地,新手玩家能够在魔方的一面添加越来越多的颜色,直到完成!整个魔方完成了!这是进步的明显标志,也是让玩家感到自豪的事情!现在他们只需要再做五次,对吧?

One of the things that made players persistently try to solve Rubik’s Cube is the sense of progress it gives. Gradually, a novice player is able to add more and more colors to one side, until voila! An entire side is completed! This is a clear sign of progress and something that makes players quite proud! Now they just have to do that five more times, right?

当然,可见的进步不仅仅在解谜中很重要。它在游戏的各个方面都很重要,甚至在生活中也是如此。研究表明,可见的进步(或缺乏进步)是工作场所情绪的主要驱动因素。考虑通货膨胀:为什么物价和工资会随着时间的推移而上涨?这不是一个经济原则;而是一个心理原则:人们希望每年加薪,因为这感觉像是一种进步。这些钱必须从某个地方来,所以最终物价会上涨。

Of course, visible progress is important in more than just puzzles. It’s important in all aspects of gameplay, and even in life. Research shows that visible progress (or lack thereof) is the primary driver of mood in the workplace. And consider inflation: why is it that prices and wages tend to rise over time? It is not an economic principle; it is a psychological one: people want to have yearly pay raises, because it feels like progress. That money has to come from somewhere, so eventually prices go up.

可见的进展对于谜题和游戏设计非常重要,因此它成为我们的下一个镜头。

Visible progress is so important to puzzle and game design that it becomes our next lens.

拼图原则#4:给人一种可解性的感觉

Puzzle Principle #4: Give a Sense of Solvability

与进步感相关的是可解性感。如果玩家开始怀疑你的谜题无法解决,他们就会担心自己在浪费时间,并厌恶地放弃。你需要让他们相信这是可以解决的。可见的进步是一种很好的方法,但直接说明你的谜题有答案也很好。回到魔方,它有一个非常优雅的方法让玩家清楚地知道这是一个可解的谜题——购买时,它已经处于解决状态——然后玩家将它打乱,通常是通过旋转它大约十几次。此时,它显然是可以解决的——只需向后旋转它所需的次数即可!但当然,大多数玩家发现解决这个问题需要更多的旋转。但尽管他们可能会感到沮丧,但他们从未怀疑过它可以解决。

Related to a sense of progress is a sense of solvability. If players begin to suspect that your puzzle is not solvable, they will become afraid that they are hopelessly wasting their time and give up in disgust. You need to convince them that it is solvable. Visible progress is a good way to do this, but so is outright stating that your puzzle has an answer. Returning to Rubik’s Cube, it had a very elegant method of making it clear to the player that it was a solvable puzzle—when purchased, it is already in the solved state—the player then scrambles it up, usually by twisting it about a dozen times. At this point, it is quite obviously solvable—in as many moves as it took to scramble it, just backward! But of course, most players find that solving it takes many more twists than that. But as frustrated as they may get, they never have any doubt that it can be solved.

谜题原则#5:逐渐增加难度

Puzzle Principle #5: Increase Difficulty Gradually

我们已经讨论过游戏难度应该逐渐增加(镜头 #38:挑战),成功的谜题也遵循这一原则。但谜题的难度怎么会增加呢?它不是要么解决要么没解决吗?大多数谜题都是通过采取一系列行动来解决的,这些行动通常是朝着解决谜题的一系列目标迈出的一小步。这些行动的难度应该逐渐增加。经典的拼图游戏提供了一系列自然平衡的步骤。试图解决拼图游戏的玩家不会只是开始把碎片粘在一起直到拼图被解开;相反,他们通常遵循以下步骤:

We’ve already discussed the fact that difficulty in games should increase gradually (Lens #38: Challenge), and successful puzzles also adhere to this maxim. But how can a puzzle increase in difficulty? Isn’t it either solved or not solved? Most puzzles are solved by taking a series of actions that are often small steps toward a chain of goals that leads to solving the puzzle. It is these actions that should gradually increase in difficulty. The classic jigsaw puzzle provides a naturally balanced series of these steps. A player who tries to solve a jigsaw puzzle doesn’t just start sticking pieces together until it is solved; instead they usually follow this sequence of steps:

  1. 将所有碎片翻转,使有图片的一面朝上(非常简单)。

  2. Flip all the pieces so that the picture side is up (mindlessly easy).

  3. 找到角块(非常简单)。

  4. Find the corner pieces (very easy).

  5. 找到边缘碎片(简单)。

  6. Find the edge pieces (easy).

  7. 将边缘部分连接成一个框架(有点挑战,但完成后很有成就感)。

  8. Connect the edge pieces into a frame (a slight challenge, rewarding when completed).

  9. 按颜色对剩余碎片进行分类(简单)。

  10. Sort the remaining pieces by color (easy).

  11. 开始组装明显彼此靠近的部分(中等挑战)。

  12. Start assembling sections that are obviously near each other (a moderate challenge).

  13. 组装可以随处携带的零件(一项重大挑战)。

  14. Assemble the pieces that could go anywhere (a significant challenge).

难度逐渐增加是拼图游戏经久不衰的原因之一。时不时地,有人会发布一款比普通拼图游戏更难的拼图游戏,他们通常会通过改变拼图的属性来做到这一点,这样就可以省去第 1 步到第 6 步中的一些步骤(或全部步骤)。

This gradual increase in difficulty is part of what gives jigsaw puzzles lasting appeal. Now and then, someone releases a jigsaw puzzle that is meant to be tougher than normal, and they usually do it by changing the properties of the puzzle so that some (or all) of steps 1 through 6 are eliminated.

下图中的“One Tough Puzzle”就是这样的。虽然它作为新奇事物很有趣,但唯一有趣的部分是它的难度瞬间就变得很高。拼图游戏逐渐增加难度的愉悦性质并没有出现,而这种性质正是拼图游戏经久不衰的魅力所在。

One Tough Puzzle, shown below, does just that. And while it is interesting as a novelty, the only interesting part about it is how immediately difficult it is. The pleasing nature of gradually increasing difficulty that makes jigsaw puzzles a perennial favorite is absent.



14.6

FIGURE

14.6

确保难度逐渐增加的一个简单方法是让玩家控制谜题步骤的顺序。以填字游戏为例——玩家有几十个问题需要回答,每个问题的答案都会提示未解答的问题。玩家自然会倾向于回答对他们来说最简单的问题,然后慢慢地回答更难的问题。给玩家这种选择被称为并行性,它还有另一个很好的特性。

One easy way to ensure that difficulty increases gradually is to give the players control over the order of the steps to your puzzle. Consider the crossword puzzle—players have dozens of questions to answer, with each one answered giving hints about the unanswered ones. Players naturally gravitate toward answering the questions that are easiest for them and slowly work their way up toward harder questions. Giving the player this kind of choice is called parallelism, and it has another excellent property.

谜题原则#6:平行设计让玩家休息

Puzzle Principle #6: Parallelism Lets the Player Rest

谜题会让玩家停下来思考。真正的危险在于,玩家无法思考如何解开谜题,无法取得进展,最终会放弃游戏。游戏本身并不完全是游戏。防止这种情况发生的一个好方法是一次给他们几个不同的相关谜题。这样,如果他们厌倦了在其中一个谜题上撞头,他们可以离开一会儿,尝试另一个。在此过程中,他们可以暂时放下第一个谜题,然后准备以休息带来的新活力再次尝试。俗话说“换个环境不如休息一下”,这在这里非常适用。填字游戏和数独等游戏自然会这样做。但电子游戏也可以这样做。很少有角色扮演游戏会一次只给玩家一个谜题和挑战——更常见的是同时提供两个或更多个平行挑战,因为这样玩家不太可能感到沮丧。

Puzzles make a player stop and think. A real danger is that the player will be unable to think their way past your puzzle and, unable to make progress, will abandon the game entirely. A good way to safeguard against this is to give them several different related puzzles at once. This way, if they get tired of banging their head on one of them, they can go off and try another for a while. In the process of doing that, they get to take a break from the first puzzle, and they may be ready to try it again with the renewed vigor that a break can provide. The old saying that “A change is as good as a rest” applies perfectly here. Games like crossword puzzles and Sudoku do this naturally. But videogames can do it as well. It is the rare RPG that gives puzzles and challenges to a player one at a time—much more common is to give two or more parallel challenges at once, since the player is much less likely to grow frustrated this way.

拼图原则7:金字塔结构扩展兴趣

Puzzle Principle #7: Pyramid Structure Extends Interest

平行结构的另一个用途是金字塔谜题结构。这意味着一系列小谜题,每个小谜题都会为更大的谜题提供某种线索。一个典型的例子是报纸上经常看到的 Jumble 乱码字游戏。

One more thing that parallelism lends itself to is pyramid puzzle structure. This means a series of small puzzles that each give some kind of clue to a larger puzzle. A classic example is the Jumble scrambled word game frequently seen in newspapers.



14.7

FIGURE

14.7

这个谜题可以变得更简单,只需让你解读这四个单词。但是,通过让每个解读出来的单词为更难的解读短语提供更多字母,这个游戏结合了短期和长期目标。它逐渐增加难度,最重要的是,金字塔有一个要点:这个游戏有一个明确而有意义的目标——找出卡通片中笑话的妙语。

This puzzle could be made simpler by just asking you to unscramble the four words. But by having each unscrambled word give a few more letters for a more difficult scrambled phrase, the game combines short- and long-term goals. It gradually increases difficulty, and most important, a pyramid has a point: this game has a single clear and meaningful goal—to figure out the punch line of the joke presented by the cartoon.

谜题原则#8:提示可以增加兴趣

Puzzle Principle #8: Hints Extend Interest

“提示?!如果我们要给出提示,那么谜题还有什么意义?”我听到了你的呼喊。好吧,有时当玩家沮丧和厌恶地准备放弃你的谜题时,一个适时的提示可以重新燃起他们的希望和好奇心。虽然它在某种程度上“贬低”了解谜体验,但有提示解谜总比完全不解谜要好得多。孩之宝的《复仇女神》做得非常出色的一件事就是加入了提示系统。它有一个“提示”按钮,按下它的玩家会听到关于他们目前正在解谜的简短的一两个词的提示,比如“楼梯”或“音乐”。再次按下它,会给出另一个不那么神秘的提示。为了平衡这个提示系统,要求提示会稍微扣分,但一般来说,玩家愿意接受打击并获得提示,而不是完全放弃谜题。一些手机上的“密室逃脱”益智游戏将这一逻辑又推进了一步——游戏免费,但提示需要花钱。

“Hints?! What is the point of even having a puzzle if we are going to give hints?” I hear you cry. Well, sometimes when a player is about to give up on your puzzle in frustration and disgust, a well-timed hint can renew their hope and their curiosity. And while it “cheapens” the puzzle-solving experience somewhat, solving a puzzle with a hint is much better than not solving it at all. One thing Hasbro’s Nemesis Factor did brilliantly was to include a hint system. It featured a “hint” button, and the player who presses it gets to hear a brief one- or two-word hint about the puzzle they are currently working on like “staircase” or “music.” Pushing it a second time gives another less cryptic hint. To help balance this hint system, there is a slight point penalty for asking for hints, but generally players are willing to take the hit and get a hint than give up on the puzzle altogether. A few mobile “escape the room” puzzle games have taken this logic one step further—the games are free to play, but hints cost money.

如今,互联网上几乎提供了所有游戏的攻略,你可以说提示对于困难的电子游戏谜题来说并不是真正必要的。但你仍然可以考虑它们,因为根据提示解决谜题可能比仅仅抄袭别人的答案更有趣。

Today, with walk-throughs of virtually every game available on the Internet, you can argue that hints are not really necessary for hard videogame puzzles. But still you might consider them, since solving a puzzle based on a hint can be more enjoyable than just cribbing the answer from someone else.

谜题原则#9:给出答案!

Puzzle Principle #9: Give the Answer!

不,说真的,听我说完。问问自己这个问题:解决谜题的乐趣是什么?大多数人回答说,是当你找到答案时获得的“啊哈!”体验。但有趣的是,这种体验不是通过解决谜题而引发的,而是通过看到答案而引发的。当然,如果你自己解决了问题,那会更开心,但如果你认真考虑过一个问题,那么只要看到或听到答案,你的解决问题的大脑就会感到一阵快感。想想悬疑小说——它们只是书本形式的大谜题。有时读者会提前猜到结局,但更多的时候,他们会感到惊讶(哦!是管家做的!我现在明白了!),这和他们自己想出来的一样令人愉快,或者奇怪的是,更令人愉快。

No, seriously, hear me out on this one. Ask yourself this question: what is it that is so pleasurable about solving puzzles? Most people answer that it is the “Aha!” experience you get when you figure out the answer. But the funny thing is that experience is triggered not by solving the puzzle but by seeing the answer. Sure, it’s a little sweeter if you solved it yourself, but if you have given serious consideration to a problem, your problem-solving brain is primed for a rush of pleasure at merely seeing or hearing the answer. Think about mystery novels—they are just big puzzles in book form. And sometimes readers guess the ending ahead of time, but more often, they are surprised (Oh! The butler did it! I see now!), which is just as pleasurable, or weirdly, more pleasurable than if they had figured it out themselves.

那么,你该如何将其付诸实践呢?在互联网时代,你可能不必这样做——如果你的游戏广为人知,你的谜题答案很快就会被发布到网上。但如果你的玩家真的被难住了,为什么不考虑让他们从游戏中找到谜题答案呢?

So, how can you put this into practice? In the age of the Internet, you probably won’t have to—if your game is known at all, answers to your puzzles will quickly be posted online. But why not consider saving your players the trouble and give them a way to find out the answers to your puzzles from within your game, if they are truly stumped?

谜题原理#10:感知转变是一把双刃剑

Puzzle Principle #10: Perceptual Shifts Are a Double-Edged Sword

考虑一下这个谜题:

Consider this puzzle:

你能把六根火柴排列成四个等边三角形吗?

Can you arrange six matchsticks so they form four equilateral triangles?

不,认真考虑一下。我的意思是,试着解决它。别担心,你回来时我会在这里。

No, seriously, consider it. And by that, I mean, try to solve it. Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you get back.

如果你尝试过,我猜会发生以下三种情况之一。要么 (A) 你以前见过这个问题,解决它时不会有愉快的“啊哈”,尽管也许有一点愉快的自鸣得意;要么 (B) 你发生了“感知转变”,也就是说,你的假设发生了巨大飞跃,并得出了正确答案,这非常令人兴奋;要么 (C) 有人告诉你答案,你有点“啊哈!”,同时又有点羞愧,因为你自己没有弄清楚;要么 (D) 你沮丧地放弃了,感到有点羞愧。

If you tried it, I’m guessing one of three things happened. Either (A) you’ve seen this one before, and solving it involved no pleasurable “Aha,” although maybe there was a little pleasurable smugness or (B) you had a “perceptual shift,” that is, a big leap in your assumptions and came up with the right answer, which was very exciting or (C) someone told you the answer, and you had a little bit of “Aha!” combined with a little bit of shame for not figuring it out yourself or (D) you gave up in frustration, feeling kind of ashamed.

我想说的是,像这样的谜题,涉及一种“要么你懂,要么你不懂”的感知转变,是一把有问题的双刃剑。当玩家能够进行感知转变时,他们会获得极大的乐趣并解决谜题。但是,如果他们无法进行感知转变,他们就一无所获。像这样的谜题几乎没有任何进展或难度逐渐增加的可能性——只是盯着看,努力寻找灵感。它们在这方面几乎就像谜语,一般来说,你会发现它们应该在电子游戏或任何其他玩家希望能够不断进步的媒介中谨慎使用。

The point I want to make with this is that puzzles like this, which involve a perceptual shift where “either you get it or you don’t,” are a problematic double-edged sword. When a player is able to make the perceptual shift, they receive a great deal of pleasure and solve the puzzle. But if they are not able to make the perceptual shift, they get nothing. Puzzles like this involve almost no possibility of progress or gradual increase in difficulty—just a lot of staring and straining for inspiration to come. They are almost like riddles in this way, and generally, you will find they should be used sparingly in videogames or in any other medium where the player expects to be able to make continual progress.

最后一部分

A Final Piece

以上就是拼图设计的十个原则。当然还有其他的,但如果你在设计中使用这十个原则,它们将对你大有裨益。拼图可以增加任何游戏都应具有有意义的心理维度。在我们进入新话题之前,我将向您展示最后一个视角,它有助于您了解您的游戏是否具有足够多且合适的谜题。

This concludes the ten principles of puzzle design. There are certainly others, but these ten can take you a long way if you use them in your designs. Puzzles can add a meaningful mental dimension to any game. Before we move on to a new topic, I’ll leave you with a final lens that is useful to see if your game has enough puzzles of the right kind.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

第十五

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

玩家通过界面玩游戏

Players Play Games through an Interface



15.1

FIGURE

15.1

阴阳之间

Between Yin and Yang



15.2

FIGURE

15.2

还记得我们在第 10 章中讨论过玩家和游戏之间的奇怪关系吗?具体来说,玩家将自己的思想置于游戏世界中,但游戏世界实际上只存在于玩家的思想中?这种神奇的情况是我们关心的一切的核心,它是由游戏界面实现的,游戏界面是玩家和游戏结合在一起的地方。界面是将白/阳/玩家和黑/阴/游戏分隔开的无限薄的膜。当界面失效时,从玩家/游戏互动中升起的微妙体验之火就会突然熄灭。因此,我们必须了解游戏界面的工作原理,并尽可能使其坚固、强大和隐形。

Remember in Chapter 10 when we talked about the strange relationship between player and game? Specifically, that the player puts their mind inside the game world, but that game world really only exists in the mind of the player? This magical situation, which is at the heart of all we care about, is made possible by the game interface, which is where player and game come together. Interface is the infinitely thin membrane that separates white/yang/player and black/yin/game. When the interface fails, the delicate flame of experience that rises from the player/game interaction is suddenly snuffed out. For this reason, it is crucial for us to understand how our game interface works and to make it as robust, as powerful, and as invisible as we can.

不过,在继续之前,我们应该考虑一下良好界面的目标。它不是“看起来不错”或“流畅”,尽管这些都是很好的品质。界面的目标是让玩家感觉可以控制他们的体验。这个想法非常重要,我们应该经常检查玩家是否感觉可以控制。

Before we proceed, though, we should consider the goal of a good interface. It isn’t “to look nice” or “to be fluid,” although those are nice qualities. The goal of an interface is to make players feel in control of their experience. This idea is important enough that we should keep a lens around for frequent examination of whether a player feels in control.

分解

Breaking It Down

就像我们在游戏设计中遇到的许多事情一样,界面并不简单,也不容易描述。“界面”可以指很多东西——游戏控制器、显示设备、操纵虚拟角色的系统、游戏向玩家传达信息的方式,以及许多其他东西。为了避免混淆并正确理解它,我们需要将其分成几个组成部分。

Like many things we encounter in game design, interface is not simple or easily described. “Interface” can mean many things—a game controller, a display device, a system of manipulating a virtual character, the way the game communicates information to the player, and many other things. To avoid confusion and to understand it properly, we need to separate it out into component parts.

让我们从外向内着手。首先,我们知道我们有一个玩家和一个游戏世界。

Let’s work from the outside in. Initially, we know that we have a player and a game world.



15.3

FIGURE

15.3

从最简单的层面来说,界面就是它们之间的一切。那么,界面里有什么呢?玩家可以通过某种方式触摸某些东西来改变游戏世界。这可以是操纵游戏板上的棋子,也可以是使用游戏控制器或键盘和鼠标。我们称之为物理输入。同样,玩家可以通过某种方式看到游戏世界中发生的事情。这可以是查看游戏板,也可以是某种带有音频或其他感官输出的显示屏。我们称之为物理输出。所以我们有以下内容:

On the simplest level, the interface is everything that is in between them. So, what is in there? There is some way that the player touches something to make changes in the world. This could be by manipulating pieces on a game board or by using a game controller or keyboard and mouse. Let’s call this physical input. And similarly, there is some way the player can see what is going on in the game world. It could be by looking at a game board, or it could be some kind of display screen with audio or other sensory output. Let’s call this physical output. So we have the following:



15.4

FIGURE

15.4

这看上去很简单,也是大多数人天真地认为游戏界面的方式。但这幅图缺少了一些重要的东西。虽然有时物理输入和输出直接与游戏世界中的元素相连,但有时也存在一定数量的中间界面。当您玩吃豆人时,屏幕顶部会显示分数,但这实际上并不是游戏世界的一部分 - 它实际上是界面的一部分。鼠标界面上的菜单和按钮也是如此,或者当您击中敌人造成 10 点伤害时,一个风格化的“10”会从他们的身体中飘出。当您玩大多数 3D 游戏时,您看不到整个世界,而是从虚拟摄像机中看到游戏世界虚拟空间中的某个位置。所有这些都是物理输入/输出和游戏世界之间存在的概念层的一部分。这一层通常被称为虚拟界面,既有输入元素(比如玩家进行选择的虚拟菜单),也有输出元素(比如分数显示)(见图15.5)。

This looks pretty simple and is the way most people naively think about game interface. But some important things are missing from this picture. While there are times when the physical input and output are directly connected to elements in the game world, there are other times that there is some amount of intermediate interface. When you play Pac-Man and there is a score display at the top of the screen, this is not really part of the game world—it is really part of the interface. The same goes for menus and buttons on mouse-based interfaces or when you hit an enemy for ten points of damage and a stylized “10” floats out of their body. When you play most 3D games, you do not see the entire world, but instead you see a view into the world from a virtual camera with a position in the virtual space of the game world. All these things are part of a conceptual layer that exists between the physical input/output and the game world. This layer is usually called virtual interface and has both input elements (such as a virtual menu where the player makes a selection) and output elements (such as a score display) (see Figure 15.5).

有时,虚拟层非常薄,几乎不存在,但有时它非常密集,充满了虚拟按钮、滑块、显示器和菜单,这些可以帮助玩家玩游戏,但不是游戏世界的一部分。这个虚拟层必须需要谨慎处理,因为正如设计师丹尼尔·伯文(Daniel Burwen)所说,界面中的抽象性越少,我们对内容的情感联系就越强。

Sometimes, the virtual layer is so thin that it is almost nonexistent, but other times, it is very dense, full of virtual buttons, sliders, displays, and menus that help the player play the game, but aren’t part of the game world. This virtual layer must be handled delicately, for, as designer Daniel Burwen notes, the less abstraction there is in an interface, the more emotional connection we feel to our content.

这样就完整地描述了游戏中涉及的主要界面元素。但是我们忽略了对任何游戏界面设计都至关重要的一点:映射。图表右侧的每个箭头都发生了一些特殊的事情 - 数据并不是简单地传递 - 相反,这些数据会根据软件的设计方式进行特殊的转换。游戏侧的每个箭头都代表一段单独的计算机代码。所有这些如何组合在一起定义了游戏的界面。

And that makes a pretty complete picture of the major interface elements involved in a game. But we’ve left out something crucial to the design of any game interface: mapping. On every arrow on the right side of the diagram, some special things are happening—it is not as if data are simply passed through—rather, these data go through a special transformation based on how the software is designed. Every one of the arrows on the game side represents a separate piece of computer code. How all this behaves together in composite defines the interface for your game.



15.5

FIGURE

15.5

以下列出这六支箭头中所包含的逻辑类型的简单示例:

Some quick examples of the kinds of logic that can be contained in each of those six arrows are as follows:

  1. 物理输入 → 世界:如果按下摇杆会让我的角色奔跑,那么映射会告诉我角色会跑多快,以及如果我放开摇杆,角色会减速多快。如果我用力推摇杆,我的角色会跑得更快吗?我的角色会随着时间的推移而加速吗?“双击”摇杆会让我的角色冲刺吗?

  2. Physical Input → World: If pushing a thumbstick makes my avatar run, the mapping tells how fast it will run and how quickly it will slow down if I let go. If I push the thumbstick harder, does my character run faster? Will my character accelerate over time? Will “double tapping” the thumbstick make my character dash?

  3. 世界 → 物理输出:如果你不能一次看到整个世界,你能看到世界的哪些部分?它将如何显示?

  4. World → Physical Output: If you cannot see the entire world at once, what parts of it can you see? How will it be shown?

  5. 物理输入 → 虚拟界面:在基于鼠标的菜单界面中,单击有什么作用?双击有什么作用?我可以拖动界面的某些部分吗?

  6. Physical Input → Virtual Interface: In a mouse-based menu interface, what does clicking do? What does double-clicking do? Can I drag parts of the interface around?

  7. 虚拟界面 → 世界:当玩家操纵虚拟界面时,这会对世界产生什么影响?如果他们在世界中选择一个物品,使用弹出菜单执行操作,该操作是立即生效还是经过一段时间的延迟?

  8. Virtual Interface → World: When the player manipulates the virtual interface, what effect does this have on the world? If they select an item in the world and use a pop-up menu to take an action on it, does that action take effect immediately or after some delay?

  9. 世界 → 虚拟界面:世界的变化在虚拟界面上是如何体现的?分数和能量条什么时候会变化?世界中的事件是否会导致界面出现特殊的弹窗或菜单或模式变化?玩家进入战斗时,是否会出现特殊的战斗菜单?

  10. World → Virtual Interface: How are changes in the world manifested in the virtual interface? When do scores and energy bars change? Do events in the world lead to special pop-up windows or menus or mode changes in the interface? When players enter a battle, will special battle menus appear?

  11. 虚拟接口 → 物理输出:向玩家显示什么数据?这些数据在屏幕上显示在哪里?这些数据是什么颜色?什么字体?生命值很低时会脉动或发出声音吗?

  12. Virtual Interface → Physical Output: What data are shown to the player, and where does it go on the screen? What colors will it be? What fonts? Will hit points pulse or make a sound when they are very low?

为了仔细研究这六种类型的连接,我们引入了两个新的镜头。

For close examination of these six types of connections, we introduce two new lenses.

当然,这六种映射不能独立设计——它们必须协同工作才能创建一个出色的界面。但在继续之前,我们必须考虑另外两种重要的映射,它们由来自玩家或更具体地说来自玩家想象的箭头表示。玩家沉浸于游戏中时,不再是按下按钮或观看电视屏幕,而是奔跑、跳跃和挥舞剑。玩家的语言中可以听出这一点。玩家通常不会说:“我控制我的化身,让她跑向城堡,然后我按下红色按钮让她扔出抓钩,然后我开始点击蓝色按钮让我的化身爬上去。”不,玩家会这样描述游戏玩法:“我跑上山,扔出抓钩,开始爬城堡的墙。”玩家将自己投射到游戏中,在某种程度上完全忽略了界面的存在,除非突然变得令人困惑。一个人将意识投射到他们所控制的任何东西上的能力几乎令人震惊。但这只有当界面成为玩家的第二天性时才有可能,这给了我们下一个视角。

Of course, these six kinds of mapping cannot be designed independently—they must all work in unison to create a great interface. But before we move on, we must consider two other important kinds of mapping, represented by the arrows that come and go from the player or, more specifically, from the player’s imagination. This is when a player becomes so immersed in a game, he or she is no longer pushing buttons and watching a television (TV) screen, instead, he or she is running, jumping, and swinging a sword. And you can hear this in a player’s language. A player generally won’t say, “I controlled my avatar, so she ran to the castle, and then I pressed the red button to make her throw a grappling hook, then I started tapping the blue button to make my avatar climb up.” No, a player describes the gameplay this way: “I ran up the hill, threw my grappling hook, and started climbing the castle wall.” Players project themselves into games and on some level disregard that the interface is there at all, unless it suddenly becomes confusing. A person’s ability to project consciousness into whatever they are controlling is almost alarming. But it is only possible if the interface becomes second nature to the player, and this gives us our next lens.

该界面是网络漫画《Penny Arcade》的模仿作品,可能并不透明。

This interface, a parody from the web comic Penny Arcade, is probably not transparent.



15.6

FIGURE

15.6

(摘自www.penny-arcade.com。已获许可使用。)

(From www.penny-arcade.com. Used with permission.)

互动循环

The Loop of Interaction

信息以循环的方式从玩家流向游戏,再从玩家流向游戏,周而复始。这几乎就像是推动水车旋转,水车旋转时会产生经验。但在这个循环中流动的信息不可能是任何信息。游戏返回给玩家的信息会极大地影响玩家接下来会这样做。这些信息通常被称为反馈,这种反馈的质量会对玩家理解和享受游戏中发生的事情的程度产生强大的影响。

Information flows in a loop from player to game to player to game, round and round. It is almost like this flow pushes a waterwheel that generates experience when it spins. But it can’t be just any information that flows around this loop. The information that is returned to the player by the game dramatically affects what the player will do next. This information is generally called feedback, and the quality of this feedback can exert a powerful influence on how much the player understands and enjoys what is happening in your game.



15.7

FIGURE

15.7

良好反馈的重要性很容易被忽视。篮球架上的篮筐就是一个例子。篮筐不会影响游戏玩法,但它会减慢篮球从篮筐落下的速度,这样所有玩家都可以清楚地看到,甚至听到篮球进了篮筐。

The importance of good feedback is easily overlooked. One example is the net on a basketball hoop. The net does not affect the gameplay at all—but it slows the ball as it descends from the hoop, so that all players can clearly see, and even hear, that it went in.

一个不太明显的例子是 Swiffer(图 15.7),这是一种简单的设备,旨在比传统的扫帚/簸箕组合更好地清洁地板。一些试图重新设计扫帚和簸箕的人只是修改了现有的解决方案,制作了一个可以夹在扫帚柄上的簸箕,制作了更坚固的扫帚刷毛,在簸箕上加了一个盖子,等等。看来 Swiffer 的设计者使用了镜头 #14问题陈述,来发明一个全新的解决方案。如果我们看看扫帚/簸箕解决方案的一些问题,

A less obvious example is the Swiffer (Figure 15.7), a simple device designed to be a better solution for cleaning floors than the traditional broom/dustpan combination. Some people who have attempted to redesign the broom and dustpan have merely modified the existing solution, making a pan that clips to the broom handle, making sturdier broom bristles, adding a lid to the dustpan, etc. It would appear that the designers of the Swiffer used Lens #14: Problem Statement, to invent a brand-new solution. If we look at some of the problems with the broom/dustpan solution,

  • 问题 1:不可能将所有灰尘都扫进簸箕里。

  • Problem #1: It’s impossible to sweep all the dust into the dustpan.

  • 问题 #2:站着的时候,簸箕不好用。蹲着的时候,扫帚不好用。

  • Problem #2: When standing, the dustpan is hard to use. When crouching, the broom is hard to use.

  • 问题#3:扫帚并没有真正清除所有的灰尘。

  • Problem #3: The broom doesn’t really get all the dust.

  • 问题#4:当您试图将灰尘扫进簸箕时,您的手会变得有点脏。

  • Problem #4: Your hands get kind of dirty when you try to sweep dust into the dustpan.

  • 问题#5:将簸箕中的灰尘倒入垃圾桶非常危险——灰尘经常会被洒出来或者吹得到处都是。

  • Problem #5: Transferring the dirt from the dustpan to the trash is perilous—it often spills or blows around.

我们看到,Swiffer 搭配其一次性抹布很好地解决了这些问题:

We see that the Swiffer, with its disposable cloth, solves these problems fairly well:

  • 解决方案#1:不需要簸箕。

  • Solution #1: No dustpan is needed.

  • 解决方案#2:使用 Swiffer 时无需蹲下。

  • Solution #2: There is no need to crouch when using the Swiffer.

  • 解决方案#3:Swiffer 抹布比扫帚能捕获更多的灰尘。

  • Solution #3: The Swiffer cloth captures far more dust than a broom can.

  • 解决方案#4:你的手保持清洁。

  • Solution #4: Your hands stay clean.

  • 解决方案#5:轻松处理布料。

  • Solution #5: The cloth is easily disposed of.

所以,Swiffer 解决了很多问题,这让它非常有吸引力。但它的吸引力不仅仅在于这些实用的东西。它有很强的心理吸引力——坦率地说,用起来很有趣。为什么?因为它的设计解决了大多数人不会说成是问题的问题。下面是一个例子:

So, the Swiffer solves a lot of problems, which makes it very appealing. But it has an appeal beyond these practical things. It has a strong psychological appeal—frankly, it is fun to use. Why? Because the design addresses problems that most people wouldn’t state as problems. Here is an example:

  • 问题#6:用户很少得到有关他们地板清洁效果的反馈。

  • Problem #6: The user gets little feedback about how well they have cleaned the floor.

除非地板真的很脏,否则仅凭观察地板很难看出清扫效果。你可能会说:“谁在乎呢?重要的是清洁效果如何,对吧?”但这种缺乏反馈会让整个任务感​​觉有些徒劳,这意味着用户会减少清洁乐趣,并且会减少清洁地板的次数。换句话说,反馈越少 = 地板越脏。但 Swiffer 很好地解决了这个问题:

Unless a floor is really dirty, it is hard to see whether your sweeping is making any difference just by looking at the floor. You might say, “Who cares? All that matters is how well it cleans, right?” But this lack of feedback can make the entire task feel somewhat futile, which means that the user enjoys it less and will clean their floor less often. In other words, less feedback = dirtier floor. But the Swiffer solves this problem very well:

  • 解决方案#6:清洁完毕后,您从地板上清除的污垢在清洁布上清晰可见。

  • Solution #6: The dirt you have removed from the floor is clearly visible on the cleaning cloth when you are done.

这种反馈非常清楚地向用户表明,他们所做的确实对地板的清洁程度产生了影响。这会引发各种乐趣——做了有益的事情的满足感、净化的乐趣,甚至拥有别人看不到的秘密知识的乐趣。虽然这种反馈直到任务结束时才会出现,但用户已经开始期待它,并期待看到这个工作做得好的具体证据。

This feedback shows the user quite clearly that what they have done makes a real difference in how clean the floor is. This triggers all kinds of pleasures—satisfaction of having done something useful, the pleasure of purification, and even the pleasure of having secret knowledge that others cannot see. And though this feedback doesn’t come until the end of the task, the user comes to anticipate it and looks forward to seeing this concrete evidence of a job well done.

使用此镜头需要付出一些努力,因为游戏中的反馈是连续的,但需要在不同情况下有所不同。在游戏的每个时刻使用此镜头需要付出很多脑力劳动,但这是值得的,因为它有助于确保游戏清晰、具有挑战性和回报。

Using this lens takes some effort, since feedback in a game is continuous but needs to be different in different situations. It takes a lot of mental effort to use this lens in every moment of your game, but it is time well spent, because it will help guarantee that the game is clear, challenging, and rewarding.



15.8

FIGURE

15.8

没有反馈的体验令人沮丧和困惑。在美国的许多人行横道上,行人可以按下按钮,让“禁止通行”标志变为“通行”标志,这样他们就可以安全地过马路了。但它不能马上改变,因为这会导致交通事故。所以可怜的行人经常不得不等待长达一分钟的时间,看看按下按钮是否有任何效果。结果,你会看到各种奇怪的按钮按下行为:有些人按下按钮并保持几秒钟;其他人则连续按下几次,只是为了安全。整个体验伴随着一种不确定的感觉——经常可以看到行人紧张地研究灯光和“禁止通行”标志,看看它们是否会改变,因为他们可能没有正确按下按钮。

Experiences without feedback are frustrating and confusing. At many crosswalks in the United States, pedestrians can push a button that will make the DON’T WALK sign change to a WALK sign so they can cross the street safely. But it can’t change right away, since that would cause traffic accidents. So the poor pedestrian often has to wait up to a minute to see whether pressing the button had any effect. As a result, you see all kinds of strange button-pressing behavior: some people push the button and hold it for several seconds; others push it several times in a row, just to be safe. And the whole experience is accompanied by a sense of uncertainty—pedestrians can often be seen nervously studying the lights and DON’T WALK sign to see if it is going to change, because they might not have pushed the button correctly.

我很高兴能到英国参观,发现有些地区的人行横道按钮会立即给出反馈,即按下按钮时亮起“等待”标志,而“行走”时间结束时则熄灭(图 15.9)!增加一些简单的反馈,让行人感到沮丧的体验变成了充满信心和掌控感的体验。

What a delight it was to visit the United Kingdom and find that in some areas the crosswalk buttons give immediate feedback in the form of an illuminated WAIT sign that comes on when the button has been pushed and turns off when the WALK period has ended (Figure 15.9)! The addition of some simple feedback turned an experience where a pedestrian feels frustrated into one where they can feel confident and in control.

一般来说,如果你的界面在十分之一秒内没有响应玩家的输入,那么玩家就会觉得界面出了问题,这是一条很好的经验法则。一个典型的有问题的例子通常出现在你制作带有“跳跃”按钮的游戏时。如果负责跳跃动画的动画师是电子游戏新手,他们很可能会在跳跃动画中加入“准备”或“预期”的元素,即角色蹲下,准备跳跃,持续大约四分之一秒到半秒。这是合理的动画练习,但是因为这违反了十分之一秒的规则(我按下跳跃按钮,但我的角色直到半秒后才真正飞到空中),这会让玩家非常沮丧。

Generally, it is a good rule of thumb that if your interface does not respond to player input within a tenth of a second, the player is going to feel like something is wrong with the interface. A typically problematic example of this often appears when you make a game with a “jump” button. If the animator working on the jump animation is new to videogames, they are very likely to put a “wind up” or “anticipation” on the jump animation, where the character crouches down, getting ready to jump, for probably one-quarter to one-half a second. This is sound animation practice, but because this breaks the tenth of a second rule (I push the jump button, but my character doesn’t actually end up in the air until a half second later), it drives players crazy with frustration.



15.9

FIGURE

15.9

有用的反馈。

Helpful feedback.

多汁

Juiciness

但让我们回到扫地的​​例子:一块脏抹布并不是 Swiffer 给用户的唯一反馈。让我们考虑一下扫帚和簸箕的另一个问题,大多数人不太可能提到这个问题。

But let’s return to our sweeping example: a dirty cloth is not the only feedback that the Swiffer gives the user. Let’s consider another problem with the broom and dustpan that most people would be unlikely to state.

  • 问题#7:扫地很无聊。

  • Problem #7: Sweeping is boring.

当然是了!这太全面了!但是我们说的无聊是什么意思呢?我们需要进一步分析。具体来说:

Well, of course it is! It’s sweeping! But what do we mean by boring? We need to break this down further. Specifically:

  • 扫动是重复性的(一遍又一遍地重复相同的动作)。

  • Sweeping is repetitive (same motion over and over).

  • 它要求你将注意力集中在一些没有意外的事情上(如果你不监视那小堆灰尘,它会到处都是)。

  • It requires you to focus your attention on something with no surprises (if you don’t monitor that little pile of dust, it goes everywhere).

Swiffer 如何应对这一挑战?

How does the Swiffer meet this challenge?

  • 解决方案#7:使用 Swiffer 很有趣!

  • Solution #7: Using the Swiffer is fun!

这很可能是 Swiffer 最大的卖点。在 Swiffer 的电视广告中,他们展示人们在屋子里欢快地跳舞清洁地板,一些广告中,人们出于好奇拿起 Swiffer,然后一边清洁地板,一边玩弄 Swiffer,就像孩子玩玩具一样。Swiffer 在镜头 #17下表现很好:玩具— 玩起来很有趣……但为什么呢?它只是一根棍子上的一块布,对吧?从某种意义上说是的,但 Swiffer 的底座,也就是放布的地方,是用一种特殊的铰链固定在棍子上的,这样当你转动手腕时,即使是轻微的转动,固定布的底座也会剧烈转动。我的手腕只要稍微动一下,清洁装置就会轻松、流畅、有力地移动 — 只需最少的努力,就能准确地进入你想要的位置。使用它就像在家里的地板上驾驶一辆神奇的赛车。清洁底座所展现的运动是二阶运动,即源自玩家动作的运动。当一个系统展现出大量二阶运动,玩家可以轻松控制,并给予玩家很多力量和奖励时,我们会说这是一个多汁的系统——就像一个成熟的桃子,只需与它进行一点点互动,就能让你获得源源不断的美味奖励。多汁性往往被忽视为游戏中的重要品质。为了避免忽视它,请使用这个视角。

This may well be the single biggest selling point of the Swiffer. In TV advertisements for the Swiffer, they show people joyously dancing through houses cleaning floors, and some ads featured people picking up the Swiffer out of sheer curiosity and then cleaning the floors while playing with the Swiffer like a child plays with a toy. And the Swiffer does very well under Lens #17: The Toy—it is fun to play with… but why? It’s just a cloth on a stick, right? Yes, in one sense, but the base of the Swiffer, where the cloth goes, is attached to the stick with a special sort of hinge, so that when you rotate your wrist, even slightly, the base that holds the cloth rotates dramatically. A little motion from my wrist makes the cleaning mechanism move easily, fluidly, and powerfully—getting into exactly the position you want it to be in with a minimum of effort. Using it feels kind of like running a magic race car around the floor of your house. The motion that the cleaning base shows is second-order motion, that is, motion that is derived from the action of the player. When a system shows a lot of second-order motion that a player can easily control and that gives the player a lot of power and rewards, we say that it is a juicy system—like a ripe peach, just a little bit of interaction with it gives you a continuous flow of delicious reward. Juiciness is often overlooked as an important quality in a game. To avoid overlooking it, use this lens.

我们在第 4 章中讨论了工作和娱乐之间的区别在于态度。我选择 Swiffer 这个非游戏示例作为例证,因为它提供的反馈非常有力,可以将工作变成娱乐。如果可能的话,界面要有趣,这一点很重要——因为你的游戏就是要有趣,如果你把枯燥、痛苦的界面作为玩家进入你所谓的有趣体验的门户,你就有可能产生内在矛盾和自我挫败的体验。记住,乐趣就是惊喜的愉悦,所以如果你的界面要有趣,它应该同时提供这两种乐趣。

We discussed in Chapter 4 how the difference between work and play is one of attitude. I chose this nongame example of the Swiffer as an illustration because the feedback it gives is so powerful that it changes work into play. And it is important for your interface to be fun, if possible—since your game is meant to be fun and you run the risk of creating inner contradictions and a self-defeating experience if you put a dry, painful interface as the player’s gateway to your supposedly fun experience. Remember, fun is pleasure with surprises, so if your interface is going to be fun, it should give both.

素数

Primality

一种往往与趣味十足的界面是手机和平板电脑上的触摸界面。触摸界面在很短的时间内极大地改变了游戏世界。尤其是小孩子,似乎很容易接受触摸界面。但为什么呢?显而易见的答案是“因为它们很直观”。但这真的是一个相当模糊的答案,因为“直观”的定义是“易于理解”。所以问题变成了“为什么触摸界面如此容易理解?”答案是:它们是原始的。

One kind of interface that tends to be associated with juicy fun is the touch interface found on phones and tablets. Touch interfaces have done a lot to change the world of gaming in a very short time. Young children, in particular, seem to take to touch interfaces with surprising ease. But why? The obvious answer is “because they are intuitive.” But that’s really a pretty vaporous answer, since the definition of “intuitive” is “easy to understand.” So the question becomes “why is it that touch interfaces are so easy to understand?” And the answer is this: they are primal.

在触摸计算出现之前,每个计算机界面都采用工具使用的形式。我会与一些物理对象(键盘、鼠标、按钮面板、打孔卡等)交互,然后会发生一些远程(不在我的手指附近)响应。逐渐地,就像所有工具一样,我们了解它们的工作原理并习惯它们。但工具的使用并不是原始的,我的意思是前人类。人类大约在三百万年前开始使用工具,这是一个相当长的历史。但动物凭直觉触摸东西的历史要长得多:大概有 3 亿或 4 亿年了。而我们的大脑当然是从这些大脑进化而来的。当你想到人类大脑的三层结构时,就会更清楚——大脑中最低层的“爬行动物”部分能够处理触觉,但工具的使用可能需要大脑最高层新皮层的帮助。

Until the advent of touch computing, every computer interface took the form of tool use. I would interact with some physical object (keyboard, mouse, button panel, punch card, etc.), and some remote (not near my finger) response would take place. Gradually, like with all tools, we learn how they work and become accustomed to them. But tool use is not primal, by which I mean, prehuman. Humans started using tools about three million years ago, which is a pretty good run. But still animals have been touching things, intuitively, for much longer: probably something like 300 or 400 million years. And our brains, of course, are evolved from those brains. When you think about the three-layer structure of the human brain, it becomes clearer—the lowest-level “reptilian” section of the brain is able to process touch, but tool use probably requires help from the neocortex, the highest level of the brain.

如果你这样想,就会明白为什么触摸比使用鼠标或游戏控制器更直观。但当然,这又引出了一个更广泛的问题——我的游戏中哪些部分是原始的,哪些部分需要更高的大脑功能?似乎可以肯定的是,你越能调动和调动大脑的原始部分,你的游戏体验就会越直观、越强大,这有助于解释为什么这么多游戏包含以下元素:

When you think of it that way, it becomes obvious why touch is more intuitive than using a mouse or game controller. But then, of course, it raises a broader question—what parts of my game are primal, and what parts require higher brain function? It seems certain that the more you can engage and involve the primal parts of the brain, the more intuitive and powerful your gameplay will feel, which helps to explain why so many games contain elements such as the following:

  • 收集类似水果的物品。

  • Gather fruit-like items.

  • 与威胁性的敌人作战。

  • Fight a threatening enemy.

  • 在陌生的环境中寻找出路。

  • Find your way through an unfamiliar environment.

  • 克服困难找到伴侣(科学家称之为“拯救公主”)。

  • Overcome obstacles to get to a mate (how scientists say “rescue the princess”).

要真正了解大脑的哪些部分参与了某项活动,您需要成为进行 MRI 研究的脑科学家。但要对您的界面和游戏活动是否具有低级原始性做出有根据的猜测,只需想想这是否是动物可以做的事情。如果它们可以,那么您很有可能正在利用原始性的力量。

To really know what parts of the brain are involved in a given activity, you need to be a brain scientist doing MRI research. But to make an educated guess about whether your interface and game activity has low-level primality, just think about whether it is something that animals can do. If they can, there’s a good chance you are tapping into the power of primality.

信息渠道

Channels of Information

任何界面的一个重要目标都是传达信息。确定游戏向玩家传达必要信息的最佳方式需要一些深思熟虑的设计,因为游戏通常包含大量信息,而且通常需要同时提供大量信息。要找出在游戏中呈现信息的最佳方式,请尝试遵循以下步骤。回顾本章开头的界面数据流图,我们主要讨论箭头 5(世界 → 虚拟界面)和 6(虚拟界面 → 物理输出)。

One important goal of any interface is to communicate information. Determining the best way for your game to communicate necessary information to the player requires some thoughtful design, since games can often contain a great deal of information and often much of it is needed at the same time. To figure out the best way to present the information in your game, try following these steps. Referring back to our interface data flow diagram from the beginning of this chapter, we are mostly talking about arrows 5 (World → Virtual Interface) and 6 (Virtual Interface → Physical Output).

步骤 1:列出信息并确定其优先顺序

Step 1: List and Prioritize Information

游戏必须呈现大量信息,但并非所有信息都同等重要。假设我们正在为类似于经典 NES 游戏《塞尔达传说》的游戏设计界面。我们可能首先列出玩家需要看到的所有信息。一个简单的无优先级列表可能看起来像

A game has to present a lot of information, but it is not all equally important. Let’s say we were designing the interface for a game similar to the classic NES game, Legend of Zelda. We might begin by listing all of the information the player needs to see. A simple unprioritized list might look like

  1. 红宝石数量

  2. Number of rubies

  3. 按键数量

  4. Number of keys

  5. 健康

  6. Health

  7. 周边环境

  8. Immediate surroundings

  9. 遥远的周围环境

  10. Distant surroundings

  11. 其他库存

  12. Other inventory

  13. 当前武器

  14. Current weapon

  15. 当前宝藏

  16. Current treasure

  17. 炸弹数量

  18. Number of bombs

现在,我们可以按重要性对它们进行排序:

Now, we might sort these by importance:

需要知道每一刻

Need to know every moment:

  • 4. 周边环境

  • 4. Immediate surroundings

玩的时候需要时不时看一下

Need to glance at from time to time while playing:

  1. 1. 红宝石数量

  2. 1. Number of rubies

  3. 2. 按键数量

  4. 2. Number of keys

  5. 3. 健康

  6. 3. Health

  7. 5. 遥远的环境

  8. 5. Distant surroundings

  9. 7. 现用武器

  10. 7. Current weapon

  11. 8. 现有宝藏

  12. 8. Current treasure

  13. 9.炸弹数量

  14. 9. Number of bombs

仅偶尔需要知道

Need to know only occasionally:

  • 6. 其他库存

  • 6. Other inventory

第 2 步:列出频道

Step 2: List Channels

信息渠道只是一种传递数据流的方式。具体渠道因游戏而异——选择渠道的方式也有很大灵活性。一些可能的信息渠道可能是

A channel of information is just a way of communicating a stream of data. Exactly what the channels are varies from game to game—and there is a lot of flexibility in how you choose them. Some possible channels of information might be

  • 屏幕顶部中央

  • The top center of the screen

  • 屏幕右下角

  • The bottom right of the screen

  • 我的头像

  • My avatar

  • 游戏音效

  • Game sound effects

  • 游戏音乐

  • Game music

  • 游戏画面的边框

  • The border of the game screen

  • 接近敌人的胸口

  • The chest of the approaching enemy

  • 角色头上的文字气球

  • The word balloon over a character’s head

列出你认为可能使用的渠道是个好主意。在《塞尔达传说》中,设计师确定的主要信息渠道是

It can be a good idea to list out the possible channels that you think you might use. In Legend of Zelda, the main channels of information the designers settled on were

  • 主展示区

  • Main display area

  • 屏幕顶部的信息仪表板

  • Dashboard of information at the top of the screen

此外,他们还决定增加一个“模式变更”,玩家可以通过点击“选择”按钮来激活该功能(我们将在本章后面讨论模式变更),该功能具有不同的信息渠道:

Also, they decided there would be a “mode change” the player could activate by hitting the “select” button (we’ll discuss mode changes later in this chapter), which has different channels of information:

  • 辅助显示区

  • Auxiliary display area

  • 屏幕底部的信息仪表板

  • Dashboard of information at the bottom of the screen

步骤 3:将信息映射到渠道

Step 3: Map Information to Channels

现在,困难的任务是将信息类型映射到不同的渠道。这通常部分是靠直觉,部分是靠经验,大部分是通过反复试验来完成的——画很多小草图,思考它们,然后重新绘制它们,直到你认为有值得尝试的东西为止。在 Zelda 中,映射如下:

Now, the difficult task comes of mapping the types of information to the different channels. This is usually done partly by instinct, partly by experience, and mostly by trial and error—drawing lots of little sketches, thinking about them, and then redrawing them, until you think you have something worth trying out. In Zelda, the mapping is as follows:

主展区

Main display area:

  • 4. 周边环境

  • 4. Immediate surroundings

屏幕顶部的信息仪表板

Dashboard of information at the top of the screen:

  1. 1. 红宝石数量

  2. 1. Number of rubies

  3. 2. 按键数量

  4. 2. Number of keys

  5. 3. 健康

  6. 3. Health

  7. 5. 遥远的环境

  8. 5. Distant surroundings

  9. 7. 现用武器

  10. 7. Current weapon

  11. 8. 现有宝藏

  12. 8. Current treasure

  13. 9.炸弹数量

  14. 9. Number of bombs

辅助显示区:

Auxiliary display area:

  • 6. 其他库存

  • 6. Other inventory

看一下主屏幕(图 15.11)和子屏幕(图 15.10),您可以看到其他有趣的选择:

Taking a look at the main screen (Figure 15.11) and subscreen (Figure 15.10), you can see other interesting choices that were made:

请注意,仪表板信息对于游戏玩法非常重要,因此需要始终显示在主屏幕和子屏幕上。仪表板的内容实际上涉及七个不同的信息渠道。注意他们是如何划分的——“生命”被认为非常重要,以至于它占据了界面的近三分之一。红宝石、钥匙和炸弹,虽然它们的功能不同,但每个都必须传达一个两位数的数字,所以它们都被分组在一起。你拿着的武器和宝藏非常重要,所以它们周围都有小盒子。“A”和“B”提醒玩家要按下哪些按钮才能使用这些物品。

Note that the dashboard information is so important to gameplay that it needs to be shown all the time on both the main screen and subscreen. And the contents of that dashboard really involve seven different channels of information. Notice how they split them up—“life” was deemed so important that it got nearly one-third of the interface. Rubies, keys, and bombs, though their functions are different, each have to communicate a two-digit number, so they are all grouped together. The weapon and treasure you are holding are so important that they have little boxes around them. The “A” and “B” are reminders to the player about which buttons to hit in order to use these items.



15.10

FIGURE

15.10

NES Zelda 子屏幕。

NES Zelda subscreen.



15.11

FIGURE

15.11

NES Zelda 主屏幕。

NES Zelda main screen.

还请注意库存屏幕上如何使用额外空间来为玩家提供一些有关如何使用它的说明。

Also note on the inventory screen how extra space was used to give the player some instruction on how to use it.

您可以看到,尽管与更现代的游戏相比,这是一个相对简单的界面,但设计师对于如何布局做出了许多决定,这些决定对游戏体验产生了重大影响。

You can see that even though this is a relatively simple interface compared to more modern games, there were many decisions the designer made about how to lay it out, and these decisions made a significant impact on the game experience.

步骤 4:检查尺寸的使用情况

Step 4: Review Use of Dimensions

游戏中的信息通道可以有多个维度。例如,如果你决定将“对敌人造成的伤害”映射到“从该敌人身上飞出的数字”,那么你就可以在那个通道上使用多个维度。其中一些可能是

A channel of information in a game can have several dimensions. For example, if you have decided to map “damage to an enemy” to “numbers that fly out of that enemy,” you have several dimensions you can work with on that channel. Some of these might be

  • 您显示的号码

  • The number you display

  • 数字的颜色

  • The color of the number

  • 数字的大小

  • The size of the numerals

  • 数字的字体

  • The font of the numerals

现在你必须决定要使用哪个维度(如果有的话)。你肯定会使用第一个维度,即数字。但颜色有什么意义吗?也许你会使用其他维度作为信息的强化物——50 以下的数字将是白色和小的,50 到 99 之间的数字将是黄色和中等的大小,但 100 及以上的数字将采用红色且非常大,并使用特殊字体来强调损坏程度。

Now you have to decide which of these dimensions, if any, you want to use. Surely you will use the first one, the number. But will the color mean anything? Perhaps you will use the other dimensions as reinforcers of the information—numbers under 50 will be white and small, numbers from 50 to 99 will be yellow and medium sized, but numbers 100 and over will be red and very large and in a special font to emphasize the amount of damage.

虽然使用多个维度来强化信息是一种让信息变得非常清晰(也很有趣)的方法,但你也可以采用不同的方法,决定将不同的信息放在不同的维度上。例如,你可以决定用数字来表示朋友(白色)或敌人(红色)。然后,你可以让数字的大小表示角色距离失败还有多远——小数字可能意味着角色还剩下很多生命值,而大数字可能意味着他们即将死亡。这种技巧非常有效和优雅。通过使用一个数字,你传达了三个不同的信息。风险在于你必须让玩家了解一个信息渠道上的这些不同维度代表什么,这可能对一些玩家来说很难理解或记住。善于利用渠道和维度是打造优雅、布局良好的界面的关键,所以我们为这种检查保留了一个特殊的视角。

And while using multiple dimensions on a channel to reinforce a piece of information is a way to make the information very clear (and also kind of juicy), you could also take a different approach and decide to put different pieces of information on the different dimensions. For example, you might decide to color the numbers to indicate friend (white) or foe (red). Then you might make the size of the numbers indicate how close the character is to defeat—small numerals might mean the character has a lot of hit points left, while large numerals might mean they are about to die. This kind of technique can be very efficient and elegant. By using a single number, you have communicated three different pieces of information. The risk is that you have to educate the player on what these different dimensions on one channel of information represent, which might be difficult for some players to understand or remember. Good use of channels and dimensions is what makes for an elegant, well laid out interface, so we keep a special lens around for this kind of examination.

模式

Modes

什么是界面模式?简单来说,它是界面图中映射箭头(1-6)之一的变化。例如,如果按下 B 按钮会改变游戏手柄的功能,这样您的角色就不会到处跑,而是瞄准水管,这是一种模式变化,箭头 #1(物理界面 → 世界)上的映射刚刚发生了变化。模式变化可能是由于六个箭头中任何一个的映射变化而发生的。

What is an interface mode? Simply put, it is a change in one of the mapping arrows (1–6) in our interface diagram. For example, if pressing the B button changes the functionality of the gamepad so that instead of making your avatar run around, it makes your avatar aim a water hose, which is a mode change, the mapping on arrow #1 (Physical Interface → World) has just changed. Mode changes can happen as a result of mapping changes on any of the six arrows.

模式是增加游戏多样性的绝佳方式,但您必须非常小心,因为如果玩家没有意识到模式已经发生变化,您可能会感到困惑。以下是一些避免界面模式出现问题的技巧。

Modes are a great way to add variety to your game, but you must be very careful, since you run a risk of confusing the player if they don’t realize that a mode change has occurred. Here are a few tips to avoid getting in trouble with interface modes.

模式提示 #1:尽可能少使用模式

模式越少,玩家感到困惑的可能性就越小。拥有多种界面模式并不是坏事,但你应该谨慎添加模式,因为每种模式都是玩家必须学习和理解的新事物。

The fewer the modes, the less chance a player is going to get confused. Having multiple interface modes isn’t a bad thing, but you should add modes cautiously, for each one is something the new the player is going to have to learn and understand.

模式提示 #2:避免模式重叠

正如我们有从游戏到玩家的信息渠道,也有从玩家到游戏的类似信息渠道。每个按钮或摇杆都是一个信息渠道;例如,假设您有一款游戏允许您在行走模式(摇杆导航)和投掷模式(摇杆瞄准)之间切换。后来,您决定添加驾驶模式(摇杆驾驶汽车)。如果玩家在驾驶时切换到投掷模式会发生什么?您可以尝试允许这样做,可能会同时进入两种模式(驾驶和投掷)。虽然这可能有效,但如果摇杆同时驾驶汽车并控制瞄准界面,也可能是一场灾难。如果您的物理界面有第二个摇杆,在所有情况下将瞄准移到第二个摇杆上可能更明智。通过使您的模式独特且不重叠,您可以避免麻烦。如果您发现需要重叠模式,请确保它们在界面上使用不同的信息渠道。例如,摇杆可以有两种导航模式(飞行或行走),按钮可以有两种射击模式(发射火球或闪电)。这些模式处于完全不同的维度,因此可以安全地重叠——我可以在行走或飞行时在发射火球和发射闪电之间切换,而不会产生任何令人困惑的效果。

Just as we have channels of information from the game to the player, there are similar channels of information from the player to the game. Each button or thumbstick is a channel of information; for example, let’s say you have a game that lets you change between walking mode (the thumbstick navigates) and throwing mode (the thumbstick aims). Later, you decide to add a driving mode as well (the thumbstick steers a car). What happens if the player changes into throwing mode while they are driving? You could try to allow this, potentially putting you into two modes at once (driving and throwing). And while this might work, it also might be a disaster if the thumbstick is simultaneously steering a car and controlling an aiming interface. It might be wiser to move the aiming, in all cases, to a second thumbstick, if your physical interface has one. By making your modes distinct and nonoverlapping, you keep yourself out of trouble. If you find you need to have overlapping modes, make sure they use different channels of information on the interface. For example, the thumbstick could have two navigating modes (flying or walking), and the button has two shooting modes (shoot fireball or lightning bolt). These modes are on completely different dimensions, so they can overlap safely—I can switch between shooting fireballs and shooting lightning bolts while either walking or flying with no confusing effects.

模式提示 #3:让不同的模式看起来尽可能不同

换句话说,用镜头 #63反馈镜头 #62透明度来审视你的模式。如果玩家不知道他们处于哪种模式,他们就会感到困惑和沮丧。旧的 Unix 文本编辑系统 vi(发音为“VI”)是令人困惑的模式的交响曲。大多数人会认为文本编辑器在启动时会处于允许您输入文本的模式。但 vi 并非如此。它实际上处于一种模式,键盘上的每个字母要么发出命令,如“删除行”,要么将编辑器置于新模式。但按下这些键不会给出您处于哪种模式的反馈。如果您真的想输入文本,您必须输入字母“i”,然后您将进入文本插入模式,它看起来与命令输入模式完全一样。您自己不可能弄清楚,即使是经验丰富的 vi 用户偶尔也会对他们所处的模式感到困惑。

In other words, look at your modes with Lens #63: Feedback, and Lens #62: Transparency. If a player doesn’t know what mode they are in, they are going to be confused and frustrated. The old Unix text editing system, vi (pronounced as “V. I.”), was a symphony of confusing modes. Most people would expect that a text editor, when it started up, would be in a mode that would allow you to enter text. But not so for vi. It was actually in a mode where each letter of the keyboard either would issue a command, like “delete line,” or would put the editor into a new mode. But hitting these keys would give no feedback about what mode you were in. If you actually wanted to enter text, you had to type a letter “i,” and then you would be in text insert mode, which looked exactly like command entry mode. It was impossible to figure out on your own, and even seasoned vi users would occasionally get confused about what mode they were in.

以下是一些让您的模式与众不同的好方法:

Here are some great ways to make your modes distinct:

  • 更改屏幕上大而可见的内容:在 Halo 和大多数第一人称射击游戏中,当你更换武器时,它非常明显。顺便提一下,你剩余的弹药量是通过一个有趣的渠道给出的——它就在你的枪的背面。

  • Change something large and visible on the screen: In Halo and most first-person shooters, when you change weapons, it is very visible. As a side note, the amount of ammo you have left is given through an interesting channel—it is right on the back of your gun.

  • 改变角色采取的动作:在经典街机游戏《丛林之王》中,玩家可以从藤蔓摆动模式切换到游泳模式。由于角色正在做的事情明显不同,因此很明显模式已经改变(他的头发颜色也发生了变化——这可能有点过头了)。

  • Change the action your avatar is taking: In the classic arcade game Jungle King, you go from a vine swinging mode to a swimming mode. Because your avatar is doing something so obviously different, it is clear that the mode has changed (also his hair changes color—that might be overkill).

  • 更改屏幕上的数据:在最终幻想游戏和大多数角色扮演游戏中,当您进入战斗模式时,许多战斗统计数据和菜单会突然出现,显然模式发生了变化。

  • Change the on screen data: In Final Fantasy games and most RPGs, when you enter combat mode, many combat statistics and menus suddenly come up, and it is obvious there has been a mode change.

  • 改变相机视角:这通常被忽视为模式改变的指标,但它可能非常有效。

  • Change the camera perspective: This is often overlooked as an indicator of a mode change, but it can be very effective.

其他界面提示

Other Interface Tips

好的,我们已经介绍了界面数据流、反馈、通道、尺寸和模式。这是一个好的开始。但是,关于界面设计的主题已经有整本书了,我们还有很多其他有趣的事情要讨论;我们必须继续前进!但在这之前,这里有一些制作优秀游戏界面的一般技巧。

Okay—we’ve covered interface data flow, feedback, channels, dimensions, and modes. That’s a good start. But whole books have been written about the topic of interface design, and we have so many other interesting things to discuss; we must move on! But before we do, here are some general tips for making good game interfaces.

界面提示#1:窃取

更礼貌地说,我们称之为界面设计的“自上而下方法”。如果你正在为一个知名的游戏类型设计界面,比如动作/平台游戏,你可以从这个领域一个知名成功的界面开始,然后根据游戏的独特之处进行修改。这可以为你节省大量的设计时间,并且有利于让用户熟悉界面。当然,如果你的游戏没有什么新东西可以提供,这会让它感觉像是一个克隆——但通常会令人惊讶的是,一个小变化会导致另一个变化,而另一个变化又会导致另一个变化,在你意识到之前,你的克隆界面已经变成了完全不同的东西。

More politely, we would call this the “top-down approach” to interface design. If you are designing an interface for a known game genre, say an action/platform game, you can begin with the interface of a known success in this area and then change it around to suit the things that are unique about your game. This can save you a lot of design time and has the benefit of being a familiar interface to your users. Of course, if your game has nothing new to offer, this will make it feel like a clone—but it is often surprising how one little change leads to another, which leads to another, and before you know it, your clone interface has morphed into something quite different.

界面提示#2:自定义

该方法也被称为自下而上的方法,与剽窃相反。使用这种方法,你可以从头开始设计界面,通过列出我们之前解释过的信息、渠道和维度。这是一种获得独特界面的好方法,可以定制你的特定游戏。如果你的游戏玩法新颖,你可能会发现这是你唯一可行的途径。但即使你的游戏玩法并不新颖,当你尝试自下而上构建它时,你可能会感到惊讶——你可能会发现自己发明了一种全新的游戏玩法,因为其他人只是在复制成功的东西,而你花时间真正研究了问题并试图做得更好。

Also called the bottom-up approach, it is the opposite of stealing. With this approach, you design your interface from scratch, by listing out information, channels, and dimensions like we explained earlier. This is a great way to get an interface that looks unique and is custom to your particular game. If your gameplay is novel, you may find this is the only path available to you. But even if your gameplay is nothing new, you may be surprised when you try to build it from the bottom up—you may find yourself inventing a whole new way to play your game, because everyone else has just been copying what is successful and you took the time to actually examine the problem and tried to do a better job.

界面提示#3:围绕物理界面进行设计

电子游戏开发领域拥有完全不同的界面平台:触摸界面、运动界面、鼠标和键盘、游戏手柄,甚至混合现实耳机。制作可以在所有这些平台上同样运行的游戏很诱人,这样您就可以将它们卖给尽可能多的人。但事实是,试图设计一款独立于任何特定界面的游戏通常会导致游戏变得乏味。想想愤怒的小鸟——它的巨大成功部分归功于它很好地利用了触摸界面。还记得玩具的镜头吗?如果你的游戏的核心互动是一种独特的玩法,利用了物理界面的独特之处,那么它就能获得足够的关注,让你放弃其他平台是值得的。

The world of videogame development features platforms with radically different interfaces: touch interfaces, motion interfaces, mouse and keyboard, gamepads, and even mixed reality headsets. It is tempting to make games that can work equally well on all these platforms, so that you can sell them to as many people as possible. But the truth is that trying to design a game independent of any particular interface is usually a path to a dull game. Think about Angry Birds—its megasuccess was partly due to the fact that it used the touch interface so well. Remember the Lens of the Toy? If the core interaction of your game is a unique type of play that takes advantage of what is unique to that physical interface, it can get enough attention to make giving up those other platforms more than worthwhile.

界面提示#4:界面主题

通常,界面设计者与游戏世界设计者是不同的。在第 6 章主题中,我们讨论了为所有内容设置主题的重要性,界面也不例外。使用镜头 #11统一检查界面的每一个部分,看看你是否能找到一种方法将其与其他体验结合在一起。

Often it is a different artist who designs the interface artwork than the one who designs the game world. In Chapter 6: Theme, we talked about the importance of theming everything, and interface is no exception. Go over every inch of your interface with Lens #11: Unification, and see if you can find a way to tie it all together with the rest of the experience.

界面提示#5:声音与触摸的映射

通常,当我们考虑在游戏中使用声音时,我们会想到创建音景来营造一种地方感(草地上鸟儿的鸣叫声),或使动作看起来更逼真(当你看到玻璃破碎时听到它破碎的声音),或向玩家反馈他们在游戏中的进度(当你捡起宝藏时会听到音乐滑音)。但声音有一个经常被忽视的方面与界面有直接关系:人类思维很容易将声音映射到触摸。这很重要,因为当我们在现实世界中操纵事物时,触摸是我们获得的操纵反馈的核心组成部分。在虚拟界面中,我们通过触觉获得的信息很少,如果有的话。但你可以通过播放适当的声音来模拟触摸,就像你打字时触摸屏键盘发出的咔嗒声一样。首先,你必须考虑如果界面是真实的,你希望界面给人什么样的感觉,然后你必须决定哪种声音最能创造这种感觉。如果你成功地做到了这一点,人们会惊叹于你的界面使用起来有多么愉快,但他们很难准确表达为什么。我非常希望未来的界面能够找到更成功地实现触觉反馈的方法,但在此之前,声音是最好的选择。

Usually, when we think of using sound in a game, we think of creating a soundscape to give a sense of place (tweeting birds in a meadow), or to make actions seem more realistic (hearing glass break when you see it break), or to give the player feedback about their progress in the game (a musical glissando when you pick up a treasure). But there is an often overlooked aspect to sound that has a direct bearing on interface: the human mind easily maps sound to touch. This is important, since when we manipulate things in the real world, touch is a central component of feedback we get about manipulation. In a virtual interface, we get little, if any, information through our touch sense. But you can simulate touch by playing appropriate sounds, in a way that touch screen keyboards that click when you type do. First, you have to think about what you would like your interface to feel like if it were real, and then you have to decide what sounds best create that feeling. If you do this successfully, people will marvel at what a pleasure your interface is to use, but they will have difficulty expressing exactly why. I have high hopes that future interfaces will find ways to more successfully involve tactile feedback, but until they do, sound is your best bet.

界面提示#6:通过层次平衡选项和简洁性

在设计界面时,您将面临两种相互冲突的需求:希望为玩家提供尽可能多的选项,以及希望使界面尽可能简单。与游戏设计中的许多事情一样,成功的关键在于取得平衡。实现这种平衡的一个好方法是通过模式和子模式创建界面层。如果您已经很好地确定了界面的优先级,那么您将有一个良好的开端来弄清楚如何做到这一点。一个典型的视频游戏示例是将库存和配置菜单隐藏在不常用的按钮(例如“开始”)下。

When designing an interface, you will be confronted by two conflicting desires: the desire to give the player as many options as possible and the desire to make your interface as simple as possible. As with so many things in game design, the key to success is striking a balance. And one good way to achieve this balance is by creating layers of interface through modes and submodes. If you have done a good job of prioritizing your interface, you will have a good head start toward figuring out how to do this. A typical videogame example of this is hiding inventory and configuration menus under an infrequently used button, such as “start.”



15.12

FIGURE

15.12

ToyTopia控制面板。小熊维尼刚刚收到“关闭”消息。(图片由 Disney Enterprises, Inc. 提供。经许可使用。

The ToyTopia control panel. A “down” message has just been sent to Winnie the Pooh. (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)

界面提示#7:使用隐喻

让玩家了解界面工作原理的一个绝佳捷径是让界面看起来与玩家之前见过的东西相似。例如,在设计游戏 ToyTopia 时,我的团队遇到了一个非常不寻常的限制。在这个游戏中,玩家向一小队发条玩具发出键盘命令(向上、向右等)。由于这是一款同步多人游戏,因此计划通过在玩家发出命令和玩具接收命令之间引入延迟来保持同步。这样,我们就可以让不同玩家的机器上的游戏保持同步,因为本地人为延迟的长度与信号从一台计算机传输到另一台计算机的不可避免的网络延迟长度相同。不幸的是(这并不奇怪),玩家发现这很令人困惑——他们习惯于按下按钮立即采取行动——而不是在事情发生之前等待半秒钟。团队感到沮丧,甚至考虑放弃整个计划,但后来有人想到,如果我们显示从虚拟按钮到玩具的可见无线电信号,并伴随一个“无线电传输”音效,可能有助于玩家更好地理解机制。而且它确实奏效了!在新系统中,无线电传输隐喻清楚地解释了动作的延迟,也为玩家提供了一些关于正在发生的事情的即时反馈。在镜头 #11统一下,这一变化有助于强化主题,即关于无线电遥控玩具。

A great shortcut to giving a player understanding of how your interface works is by making it resemble something the player has seen before. For example, in designing the game ToyTopia, my team had a very unusual constraint. In this game, the player issues keyboard commands (go up, go right, etc.) to a small team of windup toys. Since it was a synchronous multiplayer game, the plan was to keep things in sync by introducing a delay between when a player issued a command and when a toy would receive it. This way, we could keep games in sync on different players’ machines because the local artificial delay would be the same length as the unavoidable network delay of a signal traveling from one computer to another. Unfortunately (and not surprisingly), players found this to be confusing—they are used to a button push taking action immediately—not taking a half second before something happens. The team was frustrated to the point of considering abandoning the whole scheme, but then someone had the idea that if we showed a visible radio signal traveling from the virtual button to the toy and accompanied it by a “radio transmission” sound effect, it might help players understand the mechanism better. And it worked! With the new system, the radio transmission metaphor clearly explained the delay in action and also gave the players some immediate feedback about what was happening. And under Lens #11: Unification, this change helped reinforce the theme, which was about radio-controlled toys.

界面提示#8:如果看起来不同,那么它的行为也应该不同

游戏开发者经常会陷入以视觉多样性为名违背这一建议的陷阱。例如,他们可能正在制作一款与飞碟战斗的游戏。为了增加一些视觉趣味,有人想到让飞碟有不同的颜色:一些是红色的,一些是紫色的,一些是绿色的。看到这些的玩家肯定会认为它们在功能上有所不同——它们的速度可能不同,或者有不同的分值。如果它们不是这样,只是涂装不同,玩家肯定会感到失望和困惑。

Game developers frequently fall into the trap of going against this tip in the name of visual variety. For example, they might be making a game where you fight flying saucers. To add some visual spice, someone gets the idea to have the saucers be different colors: some are red, some purple, and some green. Players who see these are surely going to think that they are functionally different—that they perhaps go different speeds or have different point values. If they are not and they just have different paint jobs, players are sure to be disappointed and confused.

同样,设计师经常会犯相反的错误,设计出两个看起来一样但行为不同的事物。例如,你可能会创建一个“X”按钮,按下后会关闭部分界面。后来,需要一个允许玩家从游戏中删除物品的按钮,“X”似乎是代表删除的合理选择。但如果同一个“X”有时表示“删除”,有时表示“关闭窗口”,那么很有可能让玩家感到困惑和沮丧。

Similarly, designers often make the opposite mistake, creating two things that look the same but behave differently. For example, you might create an “X” button that when pressed, closes part of the interface. Later, in need of a button that allows players to delete items from the game, “X” might seem like a logical choice to represent delete. But if the same “X” sometimes means “delete” and sometimes means “close window,” it has a good chance of confusing and frustrating players.

界面提示#9:测试,测试,测试

没有人能第一次就把界面设计好。新游戏需要新界面,除非有人试用,否则您不能想当然地认为新界面会清晰、强大且有趣。请尽早并尽可能频繁地测试。在拥有完整的可玩游戏之前,请构建界面原型。用纸和纸板制作所有按钮或菜单系统的原型,并让人们在玩游戏和使用界面时进行演示,这样您就可以看到他们遇到的问题。最重要的是,通过以这种方式与玩家合作,就像人类学家一样,您将开始时时刻刻更好地了解他们的意图,这将为您的所有界面决策提供参考。

No one gets an interface right the first time. New games require new interfaces, and you cannot take it for granted that your new interface is going to be clear, power giving, and fun unless you have people try it out. Test it as early as possible and as often as possible. Build prototypes of your interface well before you have a complete playable game. Make paper and cardboard prototypes of any button or menu systems that you have, and get people to act out playing the game and using the interface so that you can see where they are having trouble. Most important, by working with players this way, like an anthropologist, you will start to get better ideas about their intentions from moment to moment, which will inform all of your interface decisions.

界面提示#10:打破规则来帮助你的玩家

由于许多游戏都是现有主题的变体,因此游戏之间的界面设计大量被抄袭。以至于每种游戏类型都倾向于出现某些经验法则。这些规则可能很有用,但很容易盲目地遵循它们,而不考虑它们是否真的适合你的游戏玩家。一个例子是使用鼠标的 PC 游戏。鼠标左键被视为主要按钮,有些游戏选择使用鼠标右键来实现其他功能。因此,经验法则是鼠标右键通常不应执行任何操作,除非你处于特殊模式,鼠标右键有其用途。然而,这条规则经常被过度使用——在简单的游戏中,例如儿童游戏,鼠标右键根本不使用,大多数设计师倾向于将其完全禁用,以便所有游戏都通过鼠标左键进行。但当孩子们使用鼠标时,他们经常会点击错误的鼠标按钮,因为他们的手很小。聪明的设计师打破了这一经验法则,让鼠标左键和右键都映射到相同的操作,这样任何一个按钮都可以成功按下。真的,为什么不对每个只需要一个鼠标按钮的游戏都这样做呢?

Since many games are variations on existing themes, there is a lot of copying of interface designs from game to game. So much so that certain rules of thumb tend to show up for each genre of game. These can be useful, but it is easy to follow them slavishly without thinking about whether they are really a good idea for the players of your game. One example involves PC games using a mouse. The left mouse button is considered the main button, and some games choose to use the right mouse button for other functionality. So, a rule of thumb is that the right mouse button should generally not do anything, unless you are in a special mode where it has a purpose. However, this rule is often taken too far—and in simple games, such as children’s games, where the right mouse button isn’t used at all, most designers tend to leave it completely disabled, so that all gameplay happens through the left mouse button. But when children use a mouse, they frequently click the wrong mouse button because their hands are small. Smart designers break this rule of thumb and make the left and right mouse buttons both map to the same action, so that either button can be pressed successfully. Really, why wouldn’t you do this for every game that only needs one mouse button?

游戏界面确实是体验的大门。现在让我们穿过这个大门,更仔细地看看体验本身。

The game interface is indeed the gateway to the experience. Let us pass now through that gateway and look more closely at the experience itself.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 唐纳德·诺曼的《设计心理学》。这本直截了当、脚踏实地的书充满了现实世界物体和系统设计好坏的深刻例子。它的智慧在游戏设计领域得到了惊人的体现。

  • The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. This straightforward, down-to-earth book is full of thoughtful examples of good and bad design of real-world objects and systems. Its wisdom translates surprisingly well to the realm of game design.

  • 史蒂夫·斯温克 (Steve Swink) 著的《游戏感觉》。这本独特的书专注于毫秒级的游戏界面设计,仔细剖析了游戏感觉出色的原因。这是必读书目。

  • Game Feel by Steve Swink. This unique book focuses on game interface design at the millisecond level, carefully dissecting what it is that makes games feel great. This is required reading.

  • Edward Tufte 著的《定量信息的可视化展示》。这本书被视为图形界面设计的圣经(或至少是旧约),即使只是翻阅,这本书和 Tufte 的其他三本书也能提供深刻的见解。

  • The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. Considered the bible (or at least the Old Testament) of graphical interface design, this and Tufte’s other three books can provide deep insights even when you just leaf through them.

第十六

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

可以通过兴趣曲线来判断体验

Experiences Can Be Judged by Their Interest Curves



16.1

FIGURE

16.1

我的第一个镜头

My First Lens

十六岁那年,我得到了第一份职业艺人的工作。那是在当地一家游乐园的表演团。我原本希望能参加一些表演,充分发挥我熟练的杂耍技巧,但最终我的工作变成了很多事情的混合体——操纵木偶、穿浣熊服装、在后台操作混音板,以及主持观众参与的喜剧表演。但有一天,表演团的团长,一个名叫马克·特里普的魔术师,来找我,解释说:“听着——公园东边的新舞台快完工了。我们要把音乐表演搬到那里,我要表演一场魔术。在我休息的日子里,我们需要一些其他的节目来填补空缺。你觉得你和汤姆能一起表演一场杂耍吗?”

When I was sixteen, I landed my first job working as a professional entertainer. It was in a show troupe at a local amusement park. I had hopes of being a part of shows where I could make good use of my much-practiced juggling skills, but my job ended up being a mix of a lot of things—puppeteering, wearing a raccoon costume, working the mixing board backstage, and hosting audience participation comedy shows. But one day the head of the troupe, a magician named Mark Tripp, came to me, explaining, “Listen—that new stage on the east side of the park is almost finished. We’re going to move the music revue over there, and I’m going to be putting on a magic show. On my days off, we need some other show to fill the gap. Do you think you and Tom could put together a juggling show?”

我当然非常兴奋——汤姆和我一直抓住一切机会一起练习,希望有机会表演我们自己的节目。我们讨论了一下,整理了一个粗略的脚本,简要描述了我们可以表演的各种技巧以及将它们联系在一起的说辞和笑话。我们练习了好几天,直到我们觉得可以试演了。几天后,我们的重要时刻到来了,我们可以在观众面前试演这个节目。我们以平衡动作开场,接着是一些环杂耍,然后是棍棒杂耍,然后是棍棒传递,最后是五球杂耍,我们觉得这是我们最难的技巧。表演我们自己的节目令人兴奋不已。最后,我们谢幕,胜利地回到后台。

Naturally, I was very excited—Tom and I had been practicing together every chance we could get, hoping that we might get an opportunity to do our own show. We talked it over and put together a rough script, with brief descriptions of the various tricks we could do and the patter and jokes that would link them together. We practiced it until we felt it was ready for a trial run. In a couple of days, our big moment came, and we got to try the show in front of an audience. We opened with a balancing routine, followed by some ring juggling, then club juggling, then club passing, and ending with five ball juggling, which we felt was our hardest trick. It was exhilarating to be performing our very own show. At the end, we took our bows and went backstage triumphantly.

马克在后​​台等着我们。“那么,你觉得怎么样?”我们自豪地问道。

Mark was backstage waiting for us. “Well, what did you think?” we asked proudly.

“还不错,”他说,“但还可以更好。”

“Not bad,” he said, “but it could be a lot better.”

“好些了吗?”我惊讶地说道,“但我们没有掉落任何东西!”

“Better?” I said, surprised, “but we didn’t drop anything!”

“没错,”他回答道,“但你有听观众说话吗?”

“True,” he replied, “but were you listening to that audience?”

我回想道:“嗯,我想他们热身有点慢,但他们真的很喜欢俱乐部传球动作!”

I thought back. “Well, they were a little slow to warm up, I guess, but they really liked the club passing routine!”

“是的,但是你的最后一个表演项目——五球杂耍怎么样?”

“Yes, but how about the five-ball juggling—your last routine?”

我们不得不承认,事情并没有像我们想象的那么严重。

We had to admit that didn’t go over as big as we thought it would.

“让我看看你的剧本,”他说。他仔细地读了一遍,有时点头,有时眯着眼睛看。他想了一会儿说:“你这一幕有些好东西,但进展不太对。”汤姆和我对视了一眼。

“Let me see your script,” he said. He read it over carefully, sometimes nodding, sometimes squinting at it. He thought for a moment and said, “You have some good stuff in this act, but the progression isn’t quite right.” Tom and I looked at each other.

“进展如何?”我问。

“Progression?” I asked.

“是的”,他回答道,拿起一支铅笔,“你看,你现在的节目有点像这样”,他在剧本的背面画出了这个形状:

“Yeah,” he responded, picking up a pencil, “See, your show right now is kind of shaped like this,” and he sketched this shape on the back of the script:



16.2a

FIGURE

16.2a

他继续说道:“观众一般更喜欢看这种形式的节目。”

He went on. “Audiences generally prefer to see a show shaped more like this.”



16.2b

FIGURE

16.2b

“看?”

“See?”

我没看见。但我感觉我看到了一些非常重要的东西。

I didn’t see. But I had the feeling I was looking at something very important.

“很简单。你需要从更轰动的场面开始——吸引他们的注意力。然后你退后一步,做一些小事,让他们有机会放松并了解你。然后你逐渐建立越来越大的套路,直到你给他们一个超出他们预期的盛大结局。如果你把戒指套路放在第一位,把球杆传递套路放在最后,我想你的表演会更好。”

“It’s simple. You need to start with more of a bang—to get their attention. Then you back off and do something a little smaller, to give them a chance to relax and get to know you. Then you gradually build up with bigger and bigger routines, until you give them a grand finale that exceeds their expectations. If you put your ring routine first and your club passing routine last, I think you’ll have a much better show.”

第二天,我们再次尝试表演,几乎没有改变任何内容,只是改变了表演顺序——马克说得完全正确。观众从一开始就很兴奋,然后他们的兴趣和兴奋随着表演的进行逐渐增强,随着我们的俱乐部传递表演而达到高潮。尽管我们在第二场表演中几次失误,但观众的反应是第一场表演的两倍,在最后一个表演的高潮时,有几个人跳了起来并大喊大叫。

The next day, we tried the show again, changing almost nothing but the order of the routines—and Mark was absolutely right. The audience was excited from the very beginning, and then their interest and excitement slowly built up over the course of the show to a grand climax with our club passing routine. Even though we dropped things a couple times in the second show, the audience response was twice what we had at the first show, with a few people jumping to their feet and shouting at the climax of the final routine.

马克在后​​台等着我们,这次他面带微笑。“今天似乎进展顺利,”他说。汤姆回答说:“你建议我们改变节目之后,改变就变得很明显了。我们自己却看不到这一点,这很奇怪。”

Mark was waiting for us backstage, smiling this time. “It seems like it went better today,” he said. Tom replied, “After you suggested that we change the show, it seemed so obvious. It’s weird that we couldn’t see it on our own.”

“一点也不奇怪,”马克说。“当你在制作一部剧时,你会考虑所有的细节,以及一件事与另一件事之间的联系。这需要真正改变视角,才能超越剧集本身,从观众的角度看待整个剧集。但这确实会带来不同,对吧?”

“It’s not weird at all,” said Mark. “When you are working on a show, you are thinking about all the details and how one thing links to another. It requires a real change in perspective to rise above the show and look at it as a whole from the audience’s point of view. But it makes a real difference, huh?”

“确实如此!”我说,“我想我们有很多事情要考虑。”

“It sure does!” I said, “I guess we have a lot to think about.”

“好了,现在别想了,五分钟后你们两个就要表演一场木偶戏了。”

“Well, don’t think about it now—you two have a puppet show in five minutes.”

利率曲线

Interest Curves

自从我在游乐园工作以来,我发现自己在设计游戏时一次又一次地使用这种技术,并且一直认为它很有用。但这些图表到底是什么?让我们花点时间详细研究一下它们。

Since my time at the amusement park, I have found myself using this technique again and again when designing games and have always found it useful. But what are these graphs, really? Let’s take a moment and examine them in detail.

首先要意识到的是,任何娱乐体验都是一系列时刻。有些时刻比其他时刻更强大,当我们制作这些图表时,我们通常会绘制最强大的时刻。回到我从事幻想工程的日子,当我们向迪士尼首席执行​​官介绍主题公园游乐设施的新想法时,我们肯定会被问到一个问题:“您体验中最重要的十个时刻是什么?”这个问题需要大量的思考和准备才能正确回答,但如果我们没有明确的答案,推介会就结束了。当您绘制兴趣曲线时,您正在弄清楚如何最好地安排您体验中的最佳时刻,如果您不知道它们是什么,您就无法做到这一点。这就是时刻镜头如此重要的原因。

The first thing to realize is that any entertainment experience is a series of moments. Some are more powerful than others, and when we make these graphs, we are generally charting the most powerful moments. Back in my Imagineering days, when we would present a new idea for a theme park ride to the CEO of Disney, we could expect one certain question: “What are the top ten moments in your experience?” This question takes a lot of thought and preparation to answer properly, but if we didn’t have a clear answer, the pitch meeting was over. When you chart an interest curve, you are figuring out how to best arrange the best moments of your experience, and you can’t do that if you don’t know what they are. That’s what makes the Lens of Moments so important.

一旦你了解了你的时刻,你应该如何绘制它们?娱乐体验的质量可以通过其展开的事件序列能够吸引客人兴趣的程度来衡量。我使用“客人”而不是“玩家”这个术语,因为它既适用于游戏,也适用于更一般的体验。体验过程中的兴趣水平可以用兴趣曲线绘制出来。图 16.3显示了成功娱乐体验的兴趣曲线示例。

Once you know your moments, how should you chart them out? The quality of an entertainment experience can be measured by the extent to which its unfolding sequence of events is able to hold a guest’s interest. I use the term “guest” instead of “player” because it is a term that works with games as well as more general experiences. The level of interest over the course of the experience can be plotted out in an interest curve. Figure 16.3 shows an example of an interest curve for a successful entertainment experience.

在点 (A),客人对体验产生了一定程度的兴趣;否则,他们可能不会来这里。这种最初的兴趣来自于对体验的娱乐性的先入为主的期望。取决于在体验类型上,这些期望受到包装、广告、朋友的建议等的影响。虽然我们希望这种最初的兴趣尽可能高,以吸引客人进门,但过度夸大它实际上会使整体体验变得不那么有趣。

At point (A), the guest comes into the experience with some level of interest; otherwise, they probably wouldn’t be there. This initial interest comes from preconceived expectations about how entertaining the experience will be. Depending on the type of experience, these expectations are influenced by the packaging, advertisements, advice from friends, etc. While we want this initial interest to be as high as possible to get guests in the door, overinflating it can actually make the overall experience less interesting.



16.3

FIGURE

16.3

然后体验就开始了。很快我们就到了点 (B),有时也被称为“钩子”。钩子可以真正抓住你,让你对体验感到兴奋。在音乐剧中,钩子是开场曲。在披头士乐队的歌曲《革命》中,钩子是尖叫的吉他重复乐段。在《哈姆雷特》中,钩子是鬼魂的出现。在电子游戏中,钩子通常以游戏开始前的小电影形式出现。好的钩子非常重要。它给客人一个提示,让他们知道接下来会发生什么,并激发他们的兴趣,这将有助于将注意力集中在体验开始展开但还没有发生太多事情的不那么有趣的部分。

Then the experience starts. Quickly we come to point (B), sometimes called “the hook.” This is something that really grabs you and gets you excited about the experience. In a musical, it is the opening number. In the Beatles song Revolution, it is the screaming guitar riff. In Hamlet, it is the appearance of the ghost. In a videogame, it often takes the form of a little movie before the game starts. Having a good hook is very important. It gives the guest a hint of what is to come and provides a nice interest spike, which will help sustain focus over the less interesting part where the experience is beginning to unfold and not much has happened yet.

一旦引诱结束,我们就开始着手做正事。如果体验设计得当,客人的兴趣会不断上升,在 (C) 和 (E) 等点暂时达到顶峰,偶尔会下降到 (D) 和 (F) 等点,只是为了再次上升。

Once the hook is over, we settle down to business. If the experience is well crafted, the guest’s interest will continually rise, temporarily peaking at points like (C) and (E) and occasionally dropping down a bit to points like (D) and (F), only in anticipation of rising again.

最后,在点 (G),出现了某种高潮,在点 (H),故事得到解决,客人感到满意,体验结束。希望客人离开时还能保留一些兴趣,甚至可能比进来时更感兴趣。当演艺界老手说“让他们意犹未尽”时,他们说的就是这个意思。

Finally, at point (G), there is a climax of some kind, and by point (H), the story is resolved, the guest is satisfied, and the experience is over. Hopefully, the guest goes out with some interest left over, perhaps even more than when they came in. When show business veterans say “leave them wanting more,” this is what they are talking about.

当然,并不是所有好的娱乐体验都遵循这条曲线。但大多数成功的娱乐体验都会包含我们绘制的好兴趣曲线所显示的一些元素。

Of course, not every good entertainment experience follows this exact curve. But most successful entertainment experiences will contain some of the elements that our picture of a good interest curve displays.

另一方面,此图显示的是不太成功的娱乐体验的兴趣曲线。出现不良兴趣曲线的可能性有很多,但这个尤其糟糕,尽管并不像人们希望的那样罕见。

This diagram, on the other hand, shows an interest curve for a less successful entertainment experience. There are lots of possibilities for bad interest curves, but this one is particularly bad, although not as uncommon as one might hope.



16.4

FIGURE

16.4

正如我们的良好曲线一样,客人在点 (a) 时抱有一定的兴趣,但很快便感到失望,而且由于缺乏合适的吸引点,客人的兴趣开始减弱。

As in our good curve, the guest comes in with some interest at point (a) but is immediately disappointed, and due to the lack of a decent hook, the guest’s interest begins to wane.

最终,发生了一些有趣的事情,这很好,但不会持续太久,在点 (b) 达到顶峰,客人的兴趣继续下滑,直到越过兴趣阈值 (c)。这是客人对体验失去兴趣的点,他会换频道、离开影院、关掉书本或关闭游戏。

Eventually, something somewhat interesting happens, which is good, but it doesn’t last, peaking at point (b), and the guest’s interest continues its downhill slide until it crosses, at point (c), the interest threshold. This is the point where the guest has become so disinterested in the experience that he changes the channel, leaves the theater, closes the book, or shuts off the game.

这种令人沮丧的沉闷不会永远持续下去,在点 (d) 处确实会发生一些有趣的事情,但它不会持续太久,并且体验没有达到高潮,而是在点 (e) 处逐渐消失——但这并不重要,因为客人可能在一段时间前就放弃了。

This dismal dullness doesn’t continue forever, and something interesting does happen later at point (d), but it doesn’t last, and instead of coming to a climax, the experience just peters out at point (e)—not that it matters, since the guest probably gave up on it some time ago.

在创建娱乐体验时,兴趣曲线可能是一个非常有用的工具。通过绘制体验过程中预期的兴趣水平,问题点通常会变得清晰并可以得到纠正。此外,在观察体验中的客人时,将观察到的兴趣水平与您作为艺人预期的兴趣水平进行比较是很有用的。通常,为不同的人口统计数据绘制不同的曲线是一项有用的练习。根据您的经验,它可能对某些群体来说很棒,但对其他群体来说却很无聊(例如,“男人电影”与“女人电影”),或者它可能是一种“适合每个人”的体验,这意味着针对几个不同人口统计数据群体的结构良好的曲线。

Interest curves can be a very useful tool when creating an entertainment experience. By charting out the level of expected interest over the course of an experience, trouble spots often become clear and can be corrected. Further, when observing guests having the experience, it is useful to compare their level of observed interest to the level of interest that you, as an entertainer, anticipated they would have. Often, plotting different curves for different demographics is a useful exercise. Depending on your experience, it might be great for some groups but boring for others (e.g., “guy movies” vs. “chick flicks”), or it might be an experience with “something for everyone,” meaning well-structured curves for several different demographic groups.

模式中的模式

Patterns inside Patterns

一旦你开始用兴趣曲线来思考游戏和娱乐体验,你就会开始看到兴趣曲线的模式无处不在。你可以在好莱坞电影的三幕结构中看到它。你可以看到流行歌曲的结构(音乐前奏、主歌、合唱、主歌、合唱、过渡、大结局)中也体现了这一点。亚里士多德说,每场悲剧都有复杂之处和结局,你从中就能看出这一点。喜剧演员谈到“三分法则”时,你就能看出兴趣曲线。任何时候,只要有人讲一个有趣、引人入胜或搞笑的故事,结构就在那里,就像这个“高台跳水恐怖”故事,一个女孩把它投递给青少年杂志的“尴尬时刻”专栏:

Once you start thinking about games and entertainment experiences in terms of interest curves, you start seeing the pattern of the good interest curve everywhere. You can see it in the three-act structure of a Hollywood movie. You can see it in the structure of popular songs (musical intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, big finish). When Aristotle says that every tragedy has a complication and a denouement, you can see it there. When comedians talk about the “rule of three,” you can see the interest curve. Anytime someone tells a story that is interesting, engaging, or funny, the structure is there, like in this “High Dive Horror” story, which was sent in by a girl to the “Embarrassing Moments” column of a teen magazine:

我当时在一个室内游泳池,朋友们向我挑战,让我从最高的跳水板上跳下去。我真的很怕高,但我还是爬了上去。我低着头,试图说服自己跳下去,突然我的胃翻腾起来,我吐了——直接吐到了游泳池里!更糟的是,它掉在了一群帅哥身上!我尽可能快地爬下来,躲在浴室里,但每个人都知道我做了什么!

《高台跳水恐怖》,摘自《探索女孩》杂志

I was at an indoor pool, and my friends had dared me to jump off the highest diving board. I’m really afraid of heights, but I climbed all the way up anyway. I was looking down, trying to convince myself to jump, when my stomach just turned over and I barfed—right into the pool! Even worse, it fell on a group of cute guys! I climbed down as fast as I could and hid in the bathroom, but everyone knew what I’d done!

High Dive Horror, from Discovery Girls Magazine

你甚至可以在过山车轨道的布局中非常具体地看到这种模式。而这种模式自然也出现在游戏中。我第一次使用它是在我为迪士尼乐园开发 Mark 2 版阿拉丁魔毯虚拟现实体验时。我们团队中的一些人一直在讨论,虽然这种体验很有趣,但它似乎在某一点上有点拖沓,我们正在讨论如何改进这一点。我突然想到,画一条游戏兴趣曲线可能是个好主意。它的形状大致如下:

You can even see the pattern quite concretely in the layout of a roller coaster track. And naturally, this pattern shows up in games. The first time I found myself using it was when I was working on the Mark 2 version of Aladdin’s Magic Carpet virtual reality experience for Disneyland. Some of us on the team had been discussing how, although the experience was a lot of fun, it seemed to drag a little bit at one point, and we were talking about how to improve that. It occurred to me that drawing an interest curve of the game would probably be a good idea. It had a shape roughly like this:



16.5

FIGURE

16.5

突然间,我非常清楚,平坦部分是一个真正的问题。如何解决这个问题并不明显。简单地在其中添加更多有趣的时刻可能还不够——因为如果兴趣水平太高,就会降低后续内容的兴趣。我终于意识到,将平坦部分从游戏中完全删除可能是最明智的选择。在与节目总监交谈时,他反对删除它——他觉得我们为它付出了太多努力,现在不能删除它,这可以理解,因为我们当时的开发时间已经很晚了。相反,他建议在平坦部分的开头放一条捷径,这样一些玩家就可以在需要的时候绕过那个区域。我们把捷径放进去(一个商人的帐篷,你可以飞进去,它会神奇地把你送到市中心),结果显然,知道这一点的玩家更愿意接受它。在安装后观察游戏的使用情况时,经常会看到游戏操作员在监视器上观察玩家的进度,突然俯身对玩家耳语“去那个帐篷!”当我第一次目睹这种情况时,我问操作员为什么告诉他们这一点,她回答说:“嗯,我不知道……他们似乎那样做会更开心。”

And suddenly it was very clear to me that the flat part was a real problem. How to fix it wasn’t obvious. Simply putting more interesting moments in it might not be enough—since if the interest level was too high, it would diminish the interest of what was to come later. I finally realized that it might make the most sense to cut the flat part from the game entirely. Talking to the show director, he was opposed to cutting it—he felt we’d put too much work into it to cut it now, which was understandable because we were pretty late in development at this point. Instead, he suggested putting a shortcut at the beginning of the flat part so that some players could bypass that area if they wanted. We put the shortcut in (a merchant’s tent you could fly into that magically transported you to the heart of the city), and it was clear that players who knew about it preferred to take it. Observing the game in use after installation, it was common to see the game operators watching the players progress on monitors suddenly lean down to a player and whisper in their ear “go in that tent!” When I first witnessed this, I asked the operator why she told them that, and she replied, “Well, I don’t know … they just seem to have more fun when they go that way.”

但是魔毯体验很短暂——只有大约五分钟。有必要问一问,这种模式对于较长的体验是否有意义。适用于五分钟体验的方法是否也适用于持续数小时的体验?为了证明这一点,我们来看看有史以来最受好评的游戏之一《半条命 2》 。看看这张《半条命 2》第一章中玩家死亡人数的图表,该游戏的平均完成时间为五小时三十九分钟。

But the Magic Carpet experience was a brief one—only about five minutes long. It makes sense to ask whether this pattern is meaningful at all for longer experiences. Will what works for a five-minute experience still work for one that goes on for hours? As some evidence that it does, consider the game of Half-Life 2, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. Look at this graph of the number of player deaths that happen through a game of Half-Life 2, Episode 1, which has an average completion time of five hours and thirty-nine minutes.



16.6

FIGURE

16.6

(图片由 Valve 公司于 2008 年提供。已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy 2008, Valve Corporation. Used with permission.)

这三条线表示游戏的三种难度设置。这些形状看起来很熟悉吗?可以肯定地说,玩家死亡的次数是挑战性的一个很好的指标,这与体验的趣味性有关。

The three lines indicate the three difficulty settings for the game. Do these shapes look familiar? It can certainly be argued that the number of times a player dies is a good indicator of challenge, which is connected to how interesting the experience is.

但是对于多人游戏等更长时间的游戏体验,玩家可能会玩数百小时,情况又如何呢?同样的模式如何适用于五百小时的游戏体验?答案有点令人惊讶:兴趣曲线模式可以是分形的。

But what about even longer experiences like multiplayer games, where a player might play for hundreds of hours? How can the same pattern hold up for a five-hundred-hour experience? The answer is a little surprising: interest curve patterns can be fractal.

换句话说,每个长峰,仔细观察后,都会发现它有一个类似于整体图案的内部结构。

In other words, each long peak, upon closer examination, can have an internal structure that looks like the overall pattern, something like.



16.7

FIGURE

16.7

分形兴趣曲线。

A fractal interest curve.

当然,你可以根据需要将其分为多个层次。典型的电子游戏大致分为三个层次:

And of course, this can go as many layers deep as you like. Typical video games have this pattern in roughly three levels:

  1. 游戏概要:介绍影片,随后是一系列兴趣不断上升的级别,最后以玩家击败游戏的重大高潮结束。

  2. Overall game: Intro movie, followed by a series of levels of rising interest, ending with a major climax where the player defeats the game.

  3. 每个级别:游戏一开始都会有新的美感或挑战吸引玩家,然后玩家将面临一系列挑战(战斗、谜题等),这些挑战会不断增加玩家的兴趣,直到级别结束,而级别结束通常会以某种“boss 战”结束。

  4. Each level: New aesthetics or challenges engage the player at the start, and then the player is confronted with a series of challenges (battles, puzzles, etc.) that provide rising interest until the end of the level, which often ends with some kind of “boss battle.”

  5. 每个挑战:希望玩家遇到的每个挑战本身都有一个很好的兴趣曲线,有一个有趣的介绍,并在你完成挑战的过程中逐步增加挑战。

  6. Each challenge: Every challenge the player encounters hopefully has a good interest curve in itself, with an interesting introduction, and stepped rising challenges as you work your way through it.

多人游戏必须为玩家提供更大的结构,我们将在第 25 章社区中进一步讨论。

Multiplayer games have to give the player an even larger structure, which we’ll discuss further in Chapter 25: Communities.

兴趣曲线将被证明是游戏设计师可以使用的最有用和用途最广泛的工具之一,所以让我们将其添加到我们的工具箱中。

Interest curves will prove to be one of the most useful and versatile tools you can use as a game designer, so let’s add them to our toolbox.

什么包含利息?

What Comprises Interest?

此时,你可能会发现你的分析左脑在喊道:“我喜欢这些图表和图形,但我如何客观地评估某件事对别人有多有趣?这一切似乎都很感性!”而且确实很感性。许多人问“兴趣单位”是什么。对此没有好的答案——我们还没有一个可以给出“毫乐趣”读数的趣味测量仪。但那没关系,因为我们关心的只是兴趣的相对变化——绝对兴趣不那么重要。

At this point, you might find your analytical left brain crying out, “I like these charts and graphs, but how can I objectively evaluate how interesting something is to another person? This all seems very touchy-feely!” And it is very touchy-feely. Many people ask what the “units of interest” are. And there is no good answer for that—we do not yet have a fun-o-meter that can give a reading in “millifuns.” But that’s okay, because all we care about are relative changes in interest—absolute interest is less important.

要确定兴趣水平,你必须全身心地去体验,运用你的同理心和想象力,同时运用右脑和左脑的技能。不过,你的左脑可能会很高兴知道,整体兴趣可以进一步分解为其他因素。有很多方法可以做到这一点,但我喜欢使用以下三种方法:

To determine the interest level, you have to experience it with your whole self, using your empathy and imagination and using skills of the right brain as well as the left. Still, your left brain may be happy to know that overall interest can be broken down further into other factors. There are many ways to do that, but I like to use these three:

因素一:内在兴趣

Factor 1: Inherent Interest

有些事件就是比其他事件更有趣。一般来说,风险比安全更有趣,奇特比平淡更有趣,不寻常更有趣。比普通的事物更有趣。剧烈的变化和剧烈变化的潜力总是很有趣。因此,一个关于一个男人与鳄鱼搏斗的故事可能比一个关于一个男人吃奶酪三明治的故事更有趣。我们只是有内在的驱动力,促使我们对某些事物比其他事物更感兴趣。镜头#6好奇心,在评估内在兴趣时很有用,但它是一个足够有用的概念,它有自己的镜头。

Some events are simply more interesting than others. Generally, risk is more interesting than safety, fancy is more interesting than plain, and the unusual is more interesting than the ordinary. Dramatic change and the potential for dramatic change are always interesting. Accordingly, a story about a man wrestling an alligator is probably going to be more interesting than a story about a man eating a cheese sandwich. We simply have internal drives that push us to be more interested in some things than others. Lens #6: Curiosity, comes in handy when evaluating inherent interest, but it is a useful enough concept that it gets its own lens.

然而,这些事件并不是孤立的。它们相互依存,形成了通常所说的故事线。事件的内在趣味部分取决于它们之间的相互关系。例如,在《金发姑娘和三只熊》的故事中,故事中的大多数事件都不是很有趣:金发姑娘吃粥、坐在椅子上、打盹。但这些无聊的事件使得故事中更有趣的部分成为可能,即熊发现它们的家被打扰了。

The events don’t stand alone, however. They build on one another, creating what is often called the story arc. Part of the inherent interest of events depends on how they relate to one another. For example, in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, most of the events in the story aren’t very interesting: Goldilocks eats porridge, sits in chairs, and takes a nap. But these boring events make possible the more interesting part of the story where the bears discover their home has been disturbed.

因素二:表达的诗意

Factor 2: Poetry of Presentation

这是指娱乐体验的美学。呈现体验的艺术性越美,无论是写作、音乐、舞蹈、表演、喜剧、电影摄影、平面设计还是其他什么,客人就会觉得越有趣、越引人注目。当然,如果你能把本来就有趣的东西呈现得美轮美奂,那就更好了。我们将在第23 章“美学”中进一步讨论这个问题,但现在让我们把这个有用的想法添加到我们的工具箱中。

This refers to the aesthetics of the entertainment experience. The more beautiful the artistry used in presenting the experience, whether that artistry be writing, music, dance, acting, comedy, cinematography, graphic design, or whatever, the more interesting and compelling the guests will find it. Of course, if you can give a beautiful presentation to something that is inherently interesting in the first place, all the better. We will discuss this further in Chapter 23: Aesthetics, but let’s add this useful idea to our toolbox right now.

因素 3:投影

Factor 3: Projection

这是您迫使游客运用同理心和想象力将自己融入体验的程度。这一因素对于理解故事和游戏玩法之间的共同点至关重要,需要进行一些解释。

This is the extent to which you compel a guest to use their powers of empathy and imagination to put themselves into the experience. This factor is crucial to understanding the commonality between story and gameplay and requires some explanation.

以中彩票为例(这本身就是一件很有趣的事情)。如果一个陌生人中了彩票,你可能会有点兴趣听听这件事。如果你的一个朋友中了彩票,那就更有趣了。如果你中了彩票,你肯定会很感兴趣,把注意力集中在这个事实上。发生在我们身上的事情比发生在别人身上的事情更有趣。

Consider the example of winning the lottery (an inherently interesting event). If a stranger wins the lottery, you might be mildly interested in hearing about it. If one of your friends wins the lottery, that is somewhat more interesting. If you win the lottery, you will surely be interested enough to focus your attention on that fact. Events that happen to us are just more interesting than events that happen to other people.

你可能会认为这会让讲故事的人处于不利地位,因为他们讲的故事通常是关于别人的,往往是你从未见过的人。听说过,甚至根本不存在。然而,讲故事的人知道客人有同理心,有能力把自己放在别人的位置上。讲故事艺术的一个重要部分是创造客人能轻易产生同理心的角色,因为客人越能对角色产生同理心,发生在这些角色身上的事情就越有趣。当你开始几乎任何娱乐体验时,其中的角色都是陌生人。当你了解他们时,他们会变得像你的朋友一样,你开始关心他们身上发生的事情,你对涉及他们的事件的兴趣也会增加。在某个时候,你甚至可能在精神上把自己放在他们的位置上,将你带到投射的高度。

You would think that this would put storytellers at a disadvantage, since the stories they tell are usually about someone else, often someone you have never heard of, or even someone who doesn’t actually exist. However, storytellers know that guests have the power of empathy, the ability to put themselves in the place of another person. An important part of the art of storytelling is to create characters that the guests can empathize with easily, for the more the guests can empathize with the characters, the more interesting the events become that happen to those characters. When you start almost any entertainment experience, the characters in it are strangers. As you get to know them, they become like your friends and you begin to care about what happens to them, and your interest in events involving them grows. At some point, you might even mentally put yourself in their place, bringing you to the height of projection.



16.8

FIGURE

16.8

在尝试建立投射方面,想象力与同理心同样重要。人类存在于两个世界中:面向外部的感知世界和面向内部的想象世界。每种娱乐体验都会在想象中创造自己的小世界。这个世界不必是现实的(尽管它可能如此),但它确实需要在内部保持一致。当世界一致且引人注目时,它会填满客人的想象力,从精神上讲,客人会进入这个世界。我们经常说客人“沉浸”在这个世界中。这种沉浸感会增加投射,大大提升客人的整体兴趣。让客人沉浸在故事世界中的怀疑暂停确实很脆弱。一个小小的矛盾就足以让客人回到现实并“让他们脱离”体验。

In terms of trying to build projection, imagination is as important as empathy. Humans exist in two worlds: the outward-facing world of perception and the inward-facing world of imagination. Every entertainment experience creates its own little world in the imagination. This world does not have to be realistic (although it might be), but it does need to be internally consistent. When the world is consistent and compelling, it fills the guest’s imagination, and mentally, the guest enters the world. We often say that the guest is “immersed” in the world. This kind of immersion increases projection, boosting the overall interest of the guest significantly. The suspension of disbelief that keeps the guest immersed in the story world is fragile indeed. One small contradiction is all it takes to bring the guest back to reality and “take them out” of the experience.

肥皂剧、情景喜剧和连载小说等情节式娱乐利用了投射的力量,创造出从一种娱乐体验到下一种娱乐体验都持续存在的人物和世界。回头客已经熟悉了这些持续存在的人物和场景,每次他们体验一集,他们的投射就会增强,幻想世界就会变得“更加真实”。然而,如果创作者未能小心翼翼地维护人物和世界的完整性,这种情节式策略很快就会适得其反。如果情节式娱乐的新方面如果世界与先前建立的方面相矛盾,或者常规角色开始做或说一些“不符合角色性格”的事情来服务于某个新剧集的故事情节,那么不仅剧集会受到影响,而且整个幻想世界的完整性也会受到影响,这个幻想世界涵盖了所有剧集,过去、现在和未来。从客串演员的角度来看,一集糟糕的剧集可能会毁掉整个系列,因为从矛盾点开始,受损的角色和设置就会显得虚假,客串演员很难维持投射。

Episodic forms of entertainment, such as soap operas, sitcoms, and serialized fiction, take advantage of the power of projection by creating characters and a world that persist from one entertainment experience to the next. Returning guests are already familiar with these persistent characters and settings, and each time they experience an episode, their projection grows, and the fantasy world becomes “more real.” This episodic strategy can quickly backfire, however, if the creator fails to carefully maintain the integrity of the characters and the world. If new aspects of the world contradict previously established aspects or if the regular characters start to do or say things that are “out of character” to serve the storyline of some new episode, then not only is the episode compromised, but the integrity of the entire fantasy world, which spans all episodes, past, present, and future. From the guest’s point of view, one bad episode can spoil the entire series, because the compromised characters and setting will seem phony from the point of contradiction onward and it will be difficult for the guest to sustain projection.

另一种增强玩家在你创建的世界中的投射的方法是提供多种进入该世界的方式。许多人认为基于流行电影或电视节目的玩具和游戏不过是利用成功的娱乐体验赚取额外收入的噱头。但这些玩具和游戏为孩子们提供了进入既定幻想世界的新方式。玩具让他们花更多的时间在那个世界里,他们想象自己身处幻想世界的时间越长,他们对那个世界和其中角色的投射就越大。我们将在第19 章“世界”中进一步讨论这个想法。

Another way to build up the player’s projection into the world you have created is to provide multiple ways to enter that world. Many people think of toys and games based on popular movies or television shows as nothing but a gimmicky way to make a few extra dollars by riding the coattails of a successful entertainment experience. But these toys and games provide new ways for children to access an established fantasy world. The toys let them spend more time in that world, and the longer they spend imagining they are in the fantasy world, the greater their projection into that world and the characters in it becomes. We will talk more about this idea in Chapter 19: Worlds.

在投射方面,互动娱乐具有更显著的优势。游客可以成为主角。事件实际上发生在游客身上,因此更加有趣。此外,与故事娱乐不同,故事世界只存在于游客的想象中,而互动娱乐在感知和想象之间创造了显著的重叠,允许游客直接操纵和改变故事世界。这就是为什么电子游戏可以呈现几乎没有内在趣味或诗意的事件,但仍然吸引游客。它们缺乏内在趣味和呈现诗意,但通常可以通过投射来弥补。

Interactive entertainment has an even more remarkable advantage, in terms of projection. The guest can be the main character. The events actually happen to the guest and are all the more interesting for that reason. Also, unlike story-based entertainment, where the story world exists only in the guest’s imagination, interactive entertainment creates significant overlap between perception and imagination, allowing the guest to directly manipulate and change the story world. This is why videogames can present events with little inherent interest or poetry but still be compelling to guests. What they lack in inherent interest and poetry of presentation, they can often make up for in projection.

我们将在第 20 章角色中讨论化身时进一步讨论投影,但现在让我们介绍一个镜头来检查它。

We will discuss projection further in Chapter 20: Characters when we talk about avatars, but let’s introduce a lens to examine it now.

利息因素示例

Interest Factor Examples

为了确保兴趣因素之间的关系清晰,让我们比较一些不同的娱乐体验。

To ensure the relationship between the interest factors is clear, let’s compare some different entertainment experiences.

一些勇敢的街头表演者通过玩弄电锯来吸引人们的注意。这是一个天生有趣的活动。当它在你周围发生时,很难不抬头看一看。然而,它所呈现的诗意通常有些有限。不过,还是有一些投射的,因为很容易想象被电锯错误地抓住会是什么感觉。当你亲眼目睹这一表演时,投射甚至更大(见图16.9)。

Some brave street performers attract attention by juggling running chainsaws. This is an inherently interesting event. It is hard not to at least look up when it is going on around you. The poetry with which it is presented, however, is usually somewhat limited. There is some projection, though, as it is easy to imagine what it would be like to catch the wrong end of a chainsaw. When you witness the act in person, the projection is even greater (see Figure 16.9).



16.9

FIGURE

16.9

小提琴协奏曲怎么样?事件(两根木棍相互摩擦)本身并不那么有趣,而且投射通常不太引人注目。在这种情况下,诗歌必须承载体验。如果音乐演奏得不优美,表演就不会很有趣(见图16.10)。现在,有也有例外。当音乐结构良好或晚间节目结构良好时,内在兴趣就会增强。如果音乐让你感觉仿佛身处另一个地方,或者你对音乐家产生特别的共鸣,那么可能会产生显著的投射。但这些都是例外。在大多数情况下,仅凭诗歌就足以维持对美妙音乐的兴趣。

How about a violin concerto? The events (two sticks rubbed together) are not that inherently interesting, and the projection is usually not very notable. In this case, the poetry has to carry the experience. If the music isn’t beautifully played, the performance will not be very interesting (see Figure 16.10). Now, there are exceptions. The inherent interest can build up when the music is well structured or when the evening’s program is well structured. If the music makes you feel as if you are in another place or if you feel a particular empathy for the musician, there may be significant projection. But these are exceptions. In most cases, poetry alone is enough to sustain interest in beautiful music.



16.10

FIGURE

16.10

以流行的电子游戏《俄罗斯方块》为例。游戏主要由无休止的方块下落序列组成。这几乎没有给内在趣味或诗意呈现留下空间;然而,投射可以很强烈。客人做出所有决定,成功或失败完全取决于客人的表现。这是传统讲故事无法走的捷径。就有趣的娱乐体验而言,大量的投射弥补了诗意或内在趣味的不足(见图16.11)。

Consider the popular videogame Tetris. The game mainly consists of an endless sequence of falling blocks. This leaves little room for inherent interest or poetry of presentation; however, the projection can be intense. The guest makes all the decisions, and success or failure is completely contingent on the guest’s performance. This is a shortcut that traditional storytelling is unable to take. In terms of an interesting entertainment experience, the large amount of projection makes up for what is lacking in poetry or inherent interest (see Figure 16.11).



16.11

FIGURE

16.11

综合起来

Putting It All Together

有些人发现,对他们在体验中的不同阶段发生的兴趣类型进行限定很有用,这样你就能知道哪些类型的兴趣在不同的时间引起了观众的兴趣,从而创建如下图表:

Some people find it useful to qualify the types of interest that happen at different points in their experience, letting you see which types of interest are holding the audience’s interest at different times, creating graphs that look something like:



16.12

FIGURE

16.12

不管你如何做,检查玩家对游戏的兴趣是衡量你所创造的体验质量的最佳方式。对于兴趣曲线的最佳形状,人们的看法有时会有所不同,但如果你不退一步画出体验的兴趣曲线,你就有可能只见树木不见森林。然而,如果你养成了绘制兴趣曲线的习惯,你就会获得别人可能错过的设计洞见。

However you do it, examining the interest that a player has in a game is the best way to measure the quality of the experience you are creating. Opinions sometimes differ about what shapes are best for an interest curve, but if you don’t take a step back and draw an interest curve of your experience, you risk not being able to see the forest for the trees. If you get in the habit of creating interest curves, though, you will have insights into design that others are likely to miss.

但一个问题摆在我们面前。游戏并不总是遵循相同的体验模式。它们不是线性的。如果这是真的,那么兴趣曲线对我们有什么用呢?为了正确解决这个问题,我们必须首先花一些时间讨论最传统的线性娱乐体验类型。

But a problem looms up before us. Games do not always follow the same pattern of experience. They are not linear. If that is true, then how can interest curves be of any use to us? To address that question properly, we must first spend some time discussing the most traditional type of linear entertainment experience.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 魔术与表演,作者:Henning Nelms。还记得本章开头的杂耍表演兴趣曲线故事吗?第二天,Mark Tripp 给了我一本介绍兴趣曲线主题的书。任何登上舞台的人都应该读这本书。

  • Magic and Showmanship by Henning Nelms. Remember the juggling show interest curve story at the start of this chapter? The day after that, Mark Tripp gave me a copy of this book that introduces the topic of interest curves. Anyone who ever has to stand on a stage should read this book.

第十七

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

故事是体验之一

One Kind of Experience Is the Story



17.1

FIGURE

17.1

上帝在他的一生中从未写过一部好的戏剧。

—库尔特·冯内古特

God never wrote a good play in his life.

—Kurt Vonnegut

故事/游戏二元性

Story/Game Duality

二十世纪初,物理学家开始注意到一些非常奇怪的现象。他们注意到,电磁波和亚原子粒子(长期以来被认为是相当容易理解的现象)以意想不到的方式相互作用。多年的理论、实验和再理论得出了一个奇怪的结论:波和粒子是同一种东西,都是单一现象的表现。这种“波粒二象性”挑战了所有已知的物质和能量的基础,并清楚地表明我们对宇宙的理解并不像我们想象的那么深刻。

At the dawn of the twentieth century, physicists started noticing something very strange. They noticed that electromagnetic waves and subatomic particles, which had long been thought to be fairly well-understood phenomena, were interacting in unexpected ways. Years of theorizing, experimenting, and theorizing again led to a bizarre conclusion: waves and particles were the same thing, both manifestations of a singular phenomenon. This “wave-particle duality” challenged the underpinnings of all that was known about matter and energy and made it clear that we didn’t understand the universe quite as well as we had thought.

如今我们已经进入了下一个世纪,讲故事的人也面临着类似的难题。随着电脑游戏、故事和游戏玩法的出现,两个有着截然不同规则的古老行业表现出了类似的二元性。讲故事的人现在面临着一种媒介,他们无法确定他们的故事会走哪条路,就像物理学家发现他们再也无法确定他们的电子会走哪条路一样。这两组人现在都只能用概率来说话。

Now we are well into the next century, and storytellers are faced with a similar conundrum. With the advent of computer games, story, and gameplay, two age-old enterprises with very different sets of rules show a similar duality. Storytellers are now faced with a medium where they cannot be certain what path their story will take, just as the physicists found that they could no longer be certain what path their electrons would take. Both groups can now only speak in terms of probabilities.

从历史上看,故事是单线体验,可供个人享受,而游戏是具有多种可能结果的体验,可供一群人享受。单人电脑游戏的出现挑战了这些模式。早期的电脑游戏只是传统游戏,例如井字游戏或国际象棋,但电脑充当对手。20 世纪 70 年代中期,带有故事情节的冒险游戏开始出现,让玩家成为故事中的主角。成千上万的结合故事和游戏玩法的实验开始进行。有些使用电脑和电子设备,有些使用铅笔和纸。有些取得了辉煌的成功;有些则惨遭失败。这些实验证明的一件事是,可以创造出同时具有故事和游戏玩法元素的体验。这一事实严重质疑了故事和游戏受不同规则集支配的假设。

Historically, stories have been single-threaded experiences that can be enjoyed by an individual, and games have been experiences with many possible outcomes that are enjoyed by a group. The introduction of the single-player computer game challenged these paradigms. Early computer games were simply traditional games, such as tic-tac-toe or chess but with the computer acting as the opponent. In the mid-1970s, adventure games with storylines began to appear that let the player become the main character in the story. Thousands of experiments combining story and gameplay began to take place. Some used computers and electronics, and others used pencil and paper. Some were brilliant successes; others were dismal failures. The one thing these experiments proved was that experiences could be created that had elements of both story and gameplay. This fact seriously called into question the assumption that stories and games are governed by different sets of rules.

关于故事和游戏玩法之间的关系仍存在很多争议。有些人过于注重故事,以至于他们认为增加游戏玩法肯定会毁掉一个好故事。其他人则持相反观点——他们认为一款具有强大故事元素的游戏在某种程度上被贬低了。还有一些人更喜欢中庸之道。正如游戏设计师鲍勃·贝茨曾经告诉我的那样:“故事和游戏玩法就像油和醋。理论上它们不能混合,但如果你把它们放进瓶子里,好好摇一摇,它们就会成为一道非常好吃的沙拉。”

There is still much debate about the relationship between story and gameplay. Some people are so story-oriented that they believe that adding gameplay is guaranteed to ruin a good story. Others feel the opposite—that a game with strong story elements has been cheapened somehow. Still others prefer a middle-of-the-road approach. As game designer Bob Bates once told me: “Story and gameplay are like oil and vinegar. Theoretically they don’t mix, but if you put them in a bottle and shake them up real good, they’re pretty good on a salad.”

抛开理论,仔细看看人们真正喜欢的游戏,毫无疑问,故事一定能增强游戏性,因为大多数游戏都有某种强大的故事元素,而故事元素在游戏中是罕见的。完全没有故事元素的游戏。有些故事是厚重的史诗,比如《最终幻想》系列长达数小时的精心叙述。其他故事则非常微妙。以国际象棋游戏为例。它可能是一个完全抽象的游戏,但事实并非如此——它有一层薄薄的故事线,讲述两个中世纪交战的王国。即使是完全没有故事情节的游戏也会激发玩家编造故事,赋予游戏背景意义。我最近和一些学龄儿童玩了Liar's Dice,这是一个完全抽象的骰子游戏。他们很喜欢这个游戏,但玩了几轮之后,其中一个孩子说:“让我们假装是海盗——为我们的灵魂而战!”这引起了桌子周围的所有人的热情欢迎。

Setting theory aside, and taking a good look at the game titles that people really enjoy, there can be no doubt that stories must do something to enhance gameplay, since most games have some kind of strong story element, and it is the rare game that has no story element at all. Some stories are thick, epic tales, like the elaborate multihour storytelling of the Final Fantasy series. Others are incredibly subtle. Consider the game of chess. It could be a completely abstract game, but it isn’t—it has a gossamer thin layer of story about two warring medieval kingdoms. And even games with no story built in them at all tend to inspire players to make up a story to give the game context meaning. I played Liar’s Dice with some school-age kids recently, which is a completely abstract dice game. They liked the game, but after a few rounds, one of them said, “Let’s pretend we are pirates—playing for our souls!” which was greeted with enthusiasm all around the table.

当然,归根结底,我们关心的不是创作故事还是游戏——我们关心的是创造体验。故事和游戏都可以被视为帮助创造体验的机器。在本章中,我们将讨论如何将故事和游戏结合起来,以及哪些技术最适合创造体验,而这些体验是无游戏故事或无故事游戏无法独自创造的。

Ultimately, of course, we don’t care about creating either stories or games—we care about creating experiences. Stories and games can each be thought of as machines that help create experiences. In this chapter, we will discuss how stories and games can be combined and what techniques work best for creating experiences that neither a gameless story nor a storyless game could create on its own.

被动娱乐的神话

The Myth of Passive Entertainment

在继续讨论之前,我想先澄清一个根深蒂固的误解,即互动式故事叙述与传统故事叙述完全不同。我原本希望,到了这个时代,故事类游戏每年能带来数十亿美元的收入,这种过时的误解会过时并被人们遗忘。可悲的是,这种误解似乎像野草一样在每一代新手游戏设计师的脑海中不断涌现。争论通常是这样的:

Before we go any further, I want to deal with the persistent myth that interactive storytelling is completely different from traditional storytelling. I would have hoped that by this day and age, with story-based games taking in billions of dollars each year, this antiquated misconception would be obsolete and long forgotten. Sadly, it seems to spring up, weed-like, in the minds of each new generation of novice game designers. The argument generally goes like this:

交互式故事与非交互式故事有着根本的不同,因为在非交互式故事中,你完全是被动的,只是坐在那里,看着故事缓慢地继续下去,不管有没有你在场。

Interactive stories are fundamentally different from noninteractive stories, because in noninteractive stories, you are completely passive, just sitting there, as the story plods on, with or without you.

此时,演讲者通常会翻白眼、伸出舌头、流口水来强调这一点。

At this point, the speaker usually rolls back his eyes, lolls his tongue, and drools to underline the point.

另一方面,在互动故事中,你是积极参与的,不断做出决定。你是在做事情,而不是被动地观察。事实上,互动故事叙述是一种全新的艺术形式,因此,互动设计师几乎不需要向传统的故事叙述者学习什么。

In interactive stories, on the other hand, you are active and involved, continually making decisions. You are doing things, not just passively observing them. Really, interactive storytelling is a fundamentally new art form, and as a result, interactive designers have little to learn from traditional storytellers.

认为传统讲故事的机制是人类交流能力所固有的,而互动性却在某种程度上抵消了这种机制,这种想法是荒谬的。这种故事讲得不好,无法迫使听众在讲故事的过程中思考和做出决定。当人们参与任何类型的故事情节时,无论是否互动,人们都在不断地做出决定:“接下来会发生什么?”“英雄应该做什么?”“那只兔子去哪儿了?”“不要打开那扇门!”区别只在于参与者采取行动的能力。行动的愿望和所有与之相伴的想法和情感在两种情况下都存在。一个高超的故事讲述者知道如何在听众的脑海中创造这种渴望,然后确切地知道如何以及何时(以及何时不)满足这种渴望。这种技能可以很好地转化为交互式媒体,尽管这变得更加困难,因为故事讲述者必须预测、解释、响应参与者的行为,并顺利地将参与者的行为融入体验中。

The idea that the mechanics of traditional storytelling, which are innate to the human ability to communicate, are somehow nullified by interactivity is absurd. It is a poorly told story that doesn’t compel the listener to think and make decisions during the telling. When one is engaged in any kind of storyline, interactive or not, one is continually making decisions: “What will happen next?” “What should the hero do?” “Where did that rabbit go?” “Don’t open that door!” The difference only comes in the participant’s ability to take action. The desire to act and all the thoughts and emotions that go with that are present in both. A masterful storyteller knows how to create this desire within a listener’s mind and then knows exactly how and when (and when not) to fulfill it. This skill translates well into interactive media, although it is made more difficult because the storyteller must predict, account for, respond to, and smoothly integrate the actions of the participant into the experience.

换句话说,虽然互动式故事叙述比传统故事叙述更具挑战性,但两者并无根本区别。而且,由于故事是许多游戏设计的重要组成部分,游戏设计师最好尽可能多地学习传统故事叙述技巧。

In other words, while interactive storytelling is more challenging than traditional storytelling, by no means is it fundamentally different. And since story is an important part of so many game designs, game designers are well served to learn all they can about traditional storytelling techniques.

梦想

The Dream

“但是等等!”我听到你大喊。“我有一个梦想,那就是美丽的互动故事讲述——这个梦想超越了单纯的游戏玩法,一个精彩的故事完全具有互动性,让参与者感觉自己置身于有史以来最伟大的电影中,同时仍然拥有完全的行动、思想和表达自由!如果我们继续模仿过去的故事和游戏玩法形式,这个梦想肯定无法实现。”

“But wait!” I hear you cry out. “I have a dream of beautiful interactive storytelling—a dream that rises above mere gameplay, a dream where a wonderfully told story is completely interactive, and makes the participant feel like they are in the greatest movie ever made, while still having complete freedom of action, thought, and expression! Surely this dream can’t be achieved if we continue to imitate past forms of story and gameplay.”

我承认这是一个美丽的梦想——它激发了许多有趣的交互式讲故事实验。但到目前为止,还没有人接近实现这个梦想。但这并没有阻止人们创造真正精彩、令人愉快和难忘的交互式讲故事体验,尽管这些体验在结构和给予参与者的自由方面受到一定限制。

And I admit that it is a beautiful dream—one that has spurred the creation of many fascinating experiments in interactive storytelling. But so far, no one has come anywhere close to realizing this dream. But this hasn’t stopped people from creating interactive storytelling experiences that are truly wonderful, enjoyable, and memorable, despite the fact that they are somewhat limited in the structure and in the freedom they give the participant.

很快,我们将讨论这个梦想未能实现,甚至可能永远无法实现的原因。但首先,让我们谈谈真正有效的方法。

Shortly, we’ll discuss the reasons this dream hasn’t become a reality, and may never become a reality. But first, let’s talk about what actually works.

现实

The Reality

现实世界方法 1:珍珠链

Real-World Method 1: The String of Pearls

尽管人们对互动式叙事抱有宏伟的梦想,但有两种方法主导着游戏设计领域。第一种也是电子游戏中最主要的一种方法通常被称为“珍珠链”方法,有时也被称为“江湖”方法。之所以这样称呼,是因为它可以像这样直观地表示出来:

For all the grand dreams of interactive storytelling, there are two methods that dominate the world of game design. The first and most dominant in videogames is commonly called the “string of pearls” or sometimes the “rivers and lakes” method. It is called this because it can be visually represented like this:



17.2

FIGURE

17.2

这个想法是,一个完全非交互式的故事(串)以文本、幻灯片或动画序列的形式呈现,然后给予玩家一段自由移动和控制的时间(珍珠),并牢记一个固定的目标。当目标实现时,玩家通过另一个非交互式序列沿着串向下移动到下一个珍珠,换句话说,场景切换、游戏关卡、场景切换、游戏关卡。

The idea is that a completely noninteractive story (the string) is presented in the form of a text, a slideshow, or an animated sequence and then the player is given a period of free movement and control (the pearl) with a fixed goal in mind. When the goal is achieved, the player travels down the string via another noninteractive sequence to the next pearl, in other words, cut scene, game level, cut scene, game level.

很多人批评这种方法“缺乏互动”,但玩家确实喜欢它。这其实也不足为奇。珍珠链方法为玩家提供了一种体验,让他们可以享受精心制作的故事,其中穿插着互动和挑战。成功完成挑战的奖励是什么?更多的故事和新的挑战。尽管有些人会嗤之以鼻,但这是一个运行良好的简洁系统,它在游戏玩法和故事叙述之间取得了很好的平衡。虽然老游戏有时采用的方法有些笨拙,但一些新游戏,如《古堡迷踪》 、《行尸走肉》和《最后生还者》已经展示了如何巧妙地将珍珠链和珍珠链结合在一起。

Many people criticize this method as “not really being interactive,” but players sure do enjoy it. And really there should be little wonder at that. The string of pearls method gives the player an experience where they get to enjoy a finely crafted story, punctuated with periods of interactivity and challenge. The reward for succeeding at the challenge? More story and new challenges. Though some snobs will scoff, it is a neat little system that works very well, and it strikes a nice balance between gameplay and storytelling. While older games were sometimes ham-fisted with their approach, some newer games, such as Ico, The Walking Dead, and The Last of Us have shown how artfully the string and the pearls can be joined together.

现实世界方法 2:故事机器

Real-World Method 2: The Story Machine

要理解这种方法,我们必须仔细看看什么是故事。它不过是某人与他人相关的一系列事件。“我没口香糖了,所以我去了药店”是一个故事,只是不太有趣。然而,一款好的游戏往往会产生一系列有趣的事件,这些事件往往如此有趣,以至于人们想告诉别人发生了什么。从这个角度来看,一款好的游戏就像一台故事机器——产生一系列非常有趣的事件。想想棒球比赛或高尔夫球比赛创造的数千个故事。这些游戏的设计者在设计游戏时从未考虑过这些故事,但游戏还是产生了它们。奇怪的是,设计师在游戏中加入的脚本越多(比如珍珠项链),他们的游戏可能产生的故事就越少。一些电子游戏,如《模拟人生》《我的世界》,专门设计为故事生成器,在这方面非常有效。一些评论家说这些游戏实际上不能算作“互动故事”,因为这些故事没有作者。但我们不在乎这些,因为我们只关心创造伟大的体验——如果有人体验了他们认为很棒的故事,但它没有作者,这会削弱体验的影响吗?当然不会。事实上,这是一个有趣的问题,值得考虑的是,哪个更具挑战性——创造一个伟大的故事,还是创建一个当人们与之互动时生成伟大故事的系统。无论哪种方式,这都是一种强大的互动式讲故事方法,不应被忽视或视为理所当然。YouTube 和 Twitch 上大量的“Let's Play”视频证明人们喜欢分享这些故事。使用此视角来确定如何让您的游戏成为更好的故事生成器。

To understand this method, we have to take a good look at what a story is. It is nothing more than a sequence of events that someone relates to someone else. “I was out of gum, so I went to the drugstore” is a story, just not a very interesting one. A good game, however, tends to generate series of events that are interesting, often so interesting that people want to tell someone else what happened. From this point of view, a good game is like a story machine—generating sequences of events that are very interesting indeed. Think of the thousands of stories created by the game of baseball or the game of golf. The designers of these games never had these stories in mind when they designed the games, but the games produced them, nonetheless. Curiously, the more prescripting the designer puts into their game (like with the string of pearls), the fewer stories their game is likely to produce. Some videogames, such as The Sims or Minecraft, are specifically designed to be story generators and are very effective in this regard. Some critics say that these games don’t really count as “interactive stories,” because the stories have no author. But we don’t care about that, because all we care about is creating great experiences—if someone experiences something they consider a great story, and it has no author, does that diminish the impact of the experience? Certainly not. In fact, it’s an interesting question to consider which is more challenging—to create a great story or to create a system that generates great stories when people interact with it. Either way, this is a powerful method of interactive storytelling, and one that should not be ignored or taken for granted. The vast number of “Let’s Play” videos on YouTube and Twitch are testament that people like to share these stories. Use this lens to determine how to make your game a better story generator.

就互动式叙事方法而言,这两种方法肯定涵盖了 99% 的游戏。有趣的是,它们彼此截然相反。珍珠链需要提前创作一个线性故事,而故事机器则在提前创作尽可能少的故事时蓬勃发展。“但肯定存在某种介于两者之间的东西!”我听到梦想家大喊。“这两种方法都不是互动式叙事的真正梦想!第一种方法基本上是一条线性路径,第二种方法根本不是真正的故事讲述——它只是游戏设计!我设想的故事树分支奇妙,充满了人工智能角色,还有几十个令人满意的结局,让参与者想一遍又一遍地享受它,那我的想法呢?”

In terms of methods of interactive storytelling, these two methods surely cover 99% of all games ever created. What is interesting is how opposite they are from each other. The string of pearls requires a linear story to be created ahead of time, and the story machine thrives when as little story as possible has been created ahead of time. “But surely there is something in between!” I hear the dreamer cry. “Neither of these methods are the real, true dream of interactive storytelling! The first method is basically a linear path, and the second one isn’t really storytelling at all—it’s just game design! What about my vision of a wonderfully branching story tree, full of AI characters, and dozens of satisfying endings, so that a participant will want to enjoy it over and over?”

这是个好问题。为什么这个愿景没有成为现实?为什么它不是互动故事叙述的主导形式?通常的嫌疑人(保守的出版商、意志薄弱的大众、懒惰的设计师)并不是罪魁祸首。这个愿景之所以没有成为现实,是因为它充满了许多具有挑战性的问题,这些问题尚未成功解决——而且可能永远无法解决。这些问题是真实而严重的,值得认真考虑。

And this is a good question. Why isn’t this vision a reality? Why isn’t it the dominant form of interactive storytelling? The usual suspects (conservative publishers, a weak-minded mass audience, lazy designers) are not to blame. The reason that this vision isn’t a reality is because it is riddled with many challenging problems that haven’t been successfully solved yet—and may never be solved. These problems are real and serious and deserve careful consideration.

问题

The Problems

问题1:好故事有统一性

Problem #1: Good Stories Have Unity

其实,制作一个互动故事树是一件简单的事情。只要不断做出选择,这些选择又会引出更多选择。这样做,你就会得到各种各样的故事。但其中有多少是令人愉快的?它们会有什么样的兴趣曲线?我们知道好故事的一点是它们具有强烈的统一性——故事前五分钟呈现的问题是一种驱动力,从头到尾都有意义。想象一个互动的灰姑娘故事。“你是灰姑娘。你的继母告诉你要清理壁炉。你是 (1) 这样做还是 (2) 收拾行李离开?”如果灰姑娘离开,比如说,找到了一份行政助理的工作,那就不再是灰姑娘的故事了。灰姑娘之所以处境悲惨,是因为她可以戏剧性地、突然地、出乎意料地摆脱困境。你为灰姑娘故事写的任何结局都无法与它已有的结局相比,因为整个故事是作为一个整体精心制作的——开头和结尾是一体的。编写一个有二十个结局和一个完美开头的故事至少可以说是具有挑战性的。因此,大多数具有许多分支路径的互动故事最终都会让人感觉有些单调、乏味和脱节。

Really, it is a simple thing to make an interactive story tree. Just keep making choices that lead to more choices that lead to more choices. Do that and you’ll get all kinds of stories. But how many of them will be enjoyable? What kind of interest curve will they have? One thing that we know about good stories is that they have intense unity—the problem that is presented in the first five minutes of the story is a driving force that has meaning all the way until the end. Imagine an interactive Cinderella story. “You are Cinderella. Your stepmother has told you to clean out the fireplace. Do you (1) do it or (2) pack your bags and leave?” If Cinderella leaves and, say, gets a job as an administrative assistant, it isn’t the Cinderella story anymore. The reason for Cinderella’s wretched situation is so that she can rise out of it dramatically, suddenly, and unexpectedly. No ending you could write for the Cinderella story can compare with the ending that it already has, because the whole thing is crafted as a unit—the beginning and ending are of a piece. To craft a story with twenty endings and one beginning that is the perfect beginning for each of the twenty is challenging, to say the least. As a result, most interactive stories with many branching paths end up feeling kind of watery, weak, and disconnected.

问题 2:组合爆炸

Problem #2: The Combinatorial Explosion

我担心有太多现实。

——约翰·斯坦贝克,《查理与我一起旅行》

I fear there are too many realities.

—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

这个提议似乎很简单:我会在这个场景中给玩家三个选择,在下一个场景中给玩家三个选择,依此类推。但假设你的故事有十个选择——如果每个选择都会导致一个独特的事件和三个新的选择,你就需要为玩家做出的选择写出 88,573 种不同的结果。如果十个选择听起来有点短,而你又想从故事的开头到结尾有二十个三个选择的机会,那就意味着你需要写出 5,230,176,601 个结果。在我们短暂的生命周期中,这些巨大的数字使得任何有意义的分支故事都不可能实现。可悲的是,大多数互动故事讲述者处理这种令人困惑的大量情节的主要方式是开始将结果融合在一起——就像(图 17.3):

It seems so simple to propose: I’ll give the player three choices in this scene, three in the next, and so on. But let’s say your story is ten choices deep—if each choice leads to a unique event and three new choices, you will need to write 88,573 different outcomes to the choices the player will make. And if ten choices sound kind of short, and you want to have twenty opportunities for three choices from the beginning to the end of the story, that means you’ll need to write 5,230,176,601 outcomes. These large numbers make any kind of meaningful branching storytelling impossible in our short life spans. And sadly, the main way that most interactive storytellers deal with this perplexing plethora of plotlines is to start fusing outcomes together—something like (Figure 17.3):

这无疑使故事叙述更加易于理解,但看看刚刚发生的事情。对于玩家所拥有的所有选择(好吧,实际上这里没有那么多选择),它们最终都到了同一个地方。如果这些选择都指向同一个结局,那它们还有什么意义呢?组合爆炸令人沮丧,因为它会导致妥协、妥协、妥协,最终导致故事情节薄弱。而且你仍然需要编写比玩家看到的场景更多的场景。

And this certainly makes the storytelling more manageable, but look at what has just happened. For all the choices the player had (well, not that many here, really), they all end up at the same place. How meaningful can these choices have been if they all lead to the same conclusion? The combinatorial explosion is frustrating because it leads to compromises on top of Band-Aids on top of compromises and ultimately a weak story. And you still have to write a lot more scenes than the player will ever see.



17.3

FIGURE

17.3

问题#3:多重结局令人失望

Problem #3: Multiple Endings Disappoint

互动故事讲述者喜欢幻想的一件事是,一个故事可以有多个结局是多么美妙。毕竟,这意味着玩家可以一次又一次地玩,每次都有不同的体验!而就像许多幻想一样,现实往往会令人失望。许多游戏都尝试过让游戏故事有多个结局。几乎普遍而言,当玩家第一次遇到以下结局时,他们会想到两件事:

One thing that interactive storytellers like to fantasize about is how wonderful it is that a story can have multiple endings. After all, this means the player will be able to play again and again with a different experience every time! And like many fantasies, the reality tends to disappoint. Many games have experimented with having multiple endings to their game story. Almost universally, the player ends up thinking two things when they encounter their first ending in one of these:

  1. “这是真正的结局吗?”换句话说,就是最圆满的结局,或者与故事开头最统一的结局。我们都喜欢梦想找到一种方法来写出同样有效的结局,但由于好故事具有统一性,这通常不会发生。当玩家开始怀疑自己可能走错了路时,他们就会停止体验故事,开始思考他们应该做什么,这会让任何讲故事的尝试都失败。珍珠链在这里有一个巨大的优势——玩家总是走在正确的故事道路上,他们知道这一点——任何解决问题的行动肯定是一条通往有益结局的道路。

  2. “Is this the real ending?” In other words, the happiest ending, or the ending that is most unified with the story beginning. We all like to dream that we can find a way to write equally valid endings, but because good stories have unity, this generally doesn’t happen. And when players start to suspect they may be on the wrong track, they stop experiencing the story and start thinking about what they should have done instead, which defeats any attempt at storytelling. The string of pearls has a tremendous advantage here—the player is always on the correct story path, and they know it—any problem-solving action is surely a path toward a rewarding ending.

  3. “我是不是要把整个游戏再玩一遍才能看到另一个结局?”换句话说,多重结局违背了统一的理念,尽管我们梦想着如果玩家做出不同的选择,游戏玩法会有很大的不同,但事实几乎从未如此,所以玩家现在必须进行漫长的重复游戏。跋涉去探索故事树,这可能不值得付出努力和乏味,因为第二次玩的时候可能会有很多重复的内容(为了管理组合爆炸),这在镜头 4惊喜下看起来会很糟糕。一些游戏尝试了新颖的方法来解决这个问题。臭名昭著的游戏《心灵侦探》(曾在评论中总结为“有史以来最糟糕的游戏之一,但同时也是杰作”)是一个连续移动的 30 分钟体验,最终总是以与恶棍进行最后的心灵战斗而告终,在这场战斗中,你的力量取决于你在游戏中采取的路径。因此,要想掌握游戏,你必须一遍又一遍地玩它。由于游戏的大部分内容都是视频片段,并且游戏树有一些你每次都必须经历的重大瓶颈,设计师拍摄了瓶颈区域的多个版本,每个版本都有不同的对话,但包含相同的信息。尽管设计师努力解决重复内容的问题(以及许多其他问题),但玩家普遍发现重播交互故事的过程有些乏味。

  4. “Do I have to play this whole thing again to see another ending?” In other words, the multiple endings go against the idea of unity, and as much as we would like to dream that the gameplay would be significantly different if the player made different choices, it almost never is, and so the player now has to go on a long repetitive trudge to explore the story tree, which probably will not be worth the effort and tedium, since there is likely a lot of repeated content upon a second playing (in an attempt to manage a combinatorial explosion), which will look pretty bad under Lens #4: Surprise. Some games have tried novel approaches to deal with this problem. The infamous game Psychic Detective (once summed up in a review as “One of the worst games ever made. Also, a masterpiece”) was a continuously moving 30-minute experience that always culminated in a final psychic battle with the villain, in which your powers were determined by the path you took through the game. As a result, to master the game, you had to play it through over and over again. Since most of the game consists of video clips, and the game tree has some significant bottlenecks that you must experience every time, the designers filmed multiple versions of the bottleneck areas, each with different dialog but containing the same information. As hard as the designers worked to solve the problem of repeated content (and many other problems), players generally found the process of replaying the interactive story somewhat tedious.

当然也有例外。《星球大战:旧共和国武士》提供了一种新颖的玩家选择方式——他们是想在原力的“光明面”还是“黑暗面”玩游戏,也就是说,是怀着善良还是邪恶的目标?根据您选择的路径,您将经历不同的冒险、不同的任务,最终获得不同的结局。可以说,这并不是同一个故事的两个不同结局,而是两个完全不同的故事——差异如此之大,以至于它们都同样有效。那些试图走中间路线(呃,原力的米色面?)的玩家通常会发现体验不令人满意。

There are exceptions, of course. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic featured a novel type of player choice—did they want to play the game on the “light side” or “dark side” of the force, that is, with good or evil goals? Depending on which of the paths you choose, you have different adventures, different quests, and ultimately a different ending. It can be argued that this isn’t really a case of two different endings on the same story, but two completely different stories—so different that they are each equally valid. Players who try to take the middle path (the, uh, beige side of the force?) generally find the experience to be dissatisfactory.

问题#4:动词不够

Problem #4: Not Enough Verbs

电子游戏中的角色所做的事情与电影和书籍中的角色所做的事情非常不同:

The things that videogame characters spend their time doing are very different than the things that characters in movies and books spend their time doing:

  • 视频游戏动词:奔跑、射击、跳跃、攀爬、投掷、投掷、拳击、飞行

  • Video game verbs: run, shoot, jump, climb, throw, cast, punch, fly

  • 电影动词:谈话、询问、协商、说服、争论、喊叫、恳求、抱怨

  • Movie verbs: talk, ask, negotiate, convince, argue, shout, plead, complain

电子游戏角色在做任何需要颈部以上动作的事情时都受到严重限制。故事中发生的大部分事情都是交流,而目前,电子游戏无法支持这一点。游戏设计师克里斯·斯温 (Chris Swain) 曾表示,当技术发展到玩家可以与计算机控制的游戏角色进行智能口头对话的程度时,它将产生类似于有声电影的效果。突然之间,一种主要被认为是有趣新奇事物的媒介将迅速成为文化讲故事的主导形式。然而,在此之前,电子游戏中可用动词的缺乏严重阻碍了我们将游戏用作讲故事媒介的能力。

Videogame characters are severely limited in their ability to do anything that requires something to happen above the neck. Most of what happens in stories is communication, and at the present time, videogames just can’t support that. Game designer Chris Swain has suggested that when technology advances to the point that players can have an intelligent, spoken conversation with computer-controlled game characters, it will have an effect similar to the introduction of talking pictures. Suddenly, a medium that was mostly considered an amusing novelty will quickly become the dominant form of cultural storytelling. Until then, however, the lack of usable verbs in videogames significantly hampers our ability to use games as a storytelling medium.

问题5:时间旅行让悲剧变得过时

Problem #5: Time Travel Makes Tragedy Obsolete

在互动式故事叙述面临的所有问题中,最后一个问题很可能是最被忽视、最严重和最难解决的。人们经常问这样一个问题:“为什么电子游戏不会让我们哭泣?”这很可能就是答案。悲剧故事通常被认为是最严肃、最重要和最感人的故事类型。不幸的是,它们通常是互动式故事叙述者的禁区。

Of all the problems that interactive storytelling faces, this final one is quite possibly the most overlooked, the most crippling, and the most insoluble. The question is often asked, “Why don’t videogames make us cry?” and this may well be the answer. Tragic stories are often considered the most serious, most important, and most moving type of story. Unfortunately, they are generally off limits to the interactive storyteller.

自由和控制是任何互动故事中最令人兴奋的部分之一,但它们的代价是惨痛的:故事讲述者必须放弃必然性。在一个强有力的悲剧故事中,有那么一刻,你可以看到即将发生的可怕事情,你感到自己希望、乞求并希望它不会发生——但你无力阻止这条通往必然命运的道路。这种被带向必然厄运的冲动是电子游戏故事根本无法支持的,因为每个主角都好像有一台时间机器,发生的任何严重坏事都可以被撤销。例如,你怎么能把《罗密欧与朱丽叶》做成游戏,而莎士比亚的结局(剧透:他们都自杀了)是游戏的“真正”结局?

Freedom and control are one of the most exciting parts of any interactive story, but they come at a terrible price: the storyteller must give up inevitability. In a powerful tragic story, there is a moment where you can see the horrible thing that is going to happen, and you feel yourself wishing, begging, and hoping that it won’t—but you are powerless to stop this path toward inevitable destiny. This rush of being carried along toward certain doom is something that videogame stories simply cannot support, for it is as if every protagonist has a time machine, and anything seriously bad that happens can always be undone. How could you make a game out of Romeo and Juliet, for example, where Shakespeare’s ending (spoiler alert: they both commit suicide) is the “real” ending for the game?

当然,并非所有好故事都是悲剧。但任何符合互动小说梦想条件的体验至少应该具有悲剧的潜力。相反,我们得到的却是《波斯王子:时之刃》中叙述者在你的角色死亡时吟诵的话:“等等——事实并非如此……”自由和命运是截然相反的。因此,解决这个问题的任何方法都必须非常巧妙。

Not all good stories are tragic of course. But any experience that met the qualifications of the dream of interactive fiction should at least have the potential for tragedy. Instead, we get what the narrator in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time intones when your character dies: “Wait — that’s not what really happened…” Freedom and destiny are polar opposites. As such, any solution to this problem has to be very clever indeed.

梦想重生

The Dream Reborn

交互式叙事梦想面临的问题并不小。也许有一天,人工智能会逼真到让人无法将其与人类区分开来,并密切参与我们的故事和游戏体验,但即便如此,也无法解决这里提出的所有问题——就像一款运行良好的龙与地下城游戏(其中每个游戏角色背后都有人类智慧)无法解决所有这些问题一样。没有神奇的解决方案可以同时解决所有五个问题。这并不是绝望的理由;这个梦想失败的原因是它存在缺陷。之所以有缺陷,是因为它痴迷于故事,而不是体验,而体验才是我们所关心的一切。专注于故事结构而牺牲体验,与过于专注于技术、美学或游戏结构而牺牲体验是一样的罪过。这是否意味着我们需要放弃我们的梦想?不——我们只需要改进它们。当你将梦想转变为创造创新、有意义和拓展思维的体验,并牢记这些体验可能需要以非传统的方式混合和融合传统故事和游戏结构时,梦想每天都会实现。我们生活在故事的海洋中,但大多数刚接触讲故事的人发现讲故事比他们想象的要难。以下提示和第 18 章间接控制介绍了一些有趣的方法,可让游戏的故事元素尽可能有趣和引人入胜。

The problems with the dream of interactive storytelling are not trivial. Perhaps, one day, artificial personalities so realistic that it is impossible to tell them from humans will be intimately involved in our story and game experiences, but even that does not solve all of the problems presented here—any more than a well-run game of Dungeons and Dragons, where human intelligence is behind every game character, can solve all these problems. No magic solution is likely to solve all five at once. This is not a reason to despair; the reason the dream is a failure is because it is flawed. Flawed, because it is obsessed with story, not with experience, and experience is all we care about. Focusing on story structure at the expense of experience is the same sin as focusing too much on technology, on aesthetics, or on gameplay structure at the expense of experience. Does this mean we need to discard our dreams? No—we just need to improve them. When you change your dream to one of creating innovative, meaningful, and mind-expanding experiences and keep in mind these may need to mix and blend traditional story and game structures in untraditional ways, the dream can come true for you every day. We live in a sea of stories, but most people new to storytelling find it harder than they expect. The following tips and Chapter 18: Indirect Control, address some interesting ways to make the story elements of your game as interesting and involving as possible.

游戏设计师的十个故事秘诀

Ten Story Tips for Game Designers

故事技巧1:尊重故事堆栈

Story Tip #1: Respect the Story Stack

当你希望开发一款具有引人入胜的故事的游戏时,你可能很想从编写故事开始,而不是设计游戏。绘制一个故事情节,包含引人入胜的角色和激动人心的事件,这些都具有诱人的具体性,吸引了新手游戏设计师,因为他们觉得勾勒出一个故事创意比处理复杂的游戏机制和心理要容易。但这条路充满了可怕的危险。据我所知,它毁掉的游戏比任何其他错误都要多。我从设计师 Jason Vandenberghe 那里学到了故事堆栈,他需要向我解释这一点,因为我掉进了可怕的陷阱,浪费了时间和资源,几乎毁掉了一款我非常关心的游戏。正是由于这种巨大的危险,我将这个故事技巧列为第一条。

When developing a game that you hope has a compelling story, it can be very tempting to begin not by designing a game but by writing your story. There is something enticingly concrete about plotting out a story, with engaging characters and exciting events, something that draws in novice game designers, who find it easier to sketch out a story idea than to deal with complexities of game mechanics and psychology. But this path is fraught with terrible peril. It has ruined more games than any other mistake that I know of. I learned about the story stack from designer Jason Vandenberghe, who needed to explain it to me because I had fallen into its terrible trap, wasting time, resources, and almost destroying a game I cared about very much. It is because of this intense danger that I make this story tip #1.



17.4

FIGURE

17.4

图 17.4展示了故事堆栈的全部魅力。这不是一个复杂的想法,只是构成故事游戏的五个重要元素的列表。但这些元素的排序很重要:从最不灵活的(幻想,在底部)到最灵活的(故事,在顶部)。让我们从最明智的地方开始,按顺序考虑这些元素中的每一个,以及它们如何相互关联。

Figure 17.4 shows the story stack in all its glory. It is not a complicated idea, simply a list of five important elements that comprise story games. But these elements are sorted in an important way: from least flexible (Fantasy, at the bottom) to most flexible (Story, at the top). Let us consider each of one these elements, and how they relate to each other, in order, starting at the wisest place.

幻想:说幻想是这五个元素中最不灵活的,这听起来很疯狂。毕竟,幻想不是比任何东西都更灵活吗?我可以幻想任何我想要的东西!虽然这是真的,但幻想却有一种可怕的不灵活性。幻想要么吸引玩家,要么不吸引玩家。没有中间立场。关于飞行超级英雄的故事游戏是有道理的……很多人都有这种幻想。但是,关于成为一名专业洗碗工的故事游戏呢?你会很难让人们感兴趣,因为那不是大多数人的幻想。从强烈的幻想开始设计很重要——毕竟,人们玩游戏的主要原因之一是幻想的实现。如果你的幻想不能引起玩家的共鸣,你所做的其他一切都将是一场骗局。艰苦的战斗。对游戏核心幻想的清晰表述是您可以构建强大游戏的基石。

Fantasy: It sounds crazy to say that of these five elements, fantasy is the least flexible. After all, isn’t fantasy more flexible than anything? I can fantasize about anything I want! And while that is true, there is something terrifyingly inflexible about fantasies. Either a fantasy appeals to a player or it does not. There is no middle ground. A story game about a flying superhero makes sense… many people have that fantasy. But, a story game about being a professional dishwasher? You’ll have a much harder time keeping people interested, because that just isn’t a fantasy that most people have. It is important to begin your design with a strong fantasy—after all, one of the main reasons that people play games is fantasy fulfillment. If your fantasy fails to resonate with your players, everything else you do will be an uphill battle. A clear statement of the central fantasy of your game is a rock upon which you can build something powerful.

行动:一旦您清楚地表达了自己的幻想,接下来就需要考虑哪些玩家行动最适合实现该幻想。在开发部分基于迪士尼小叮当电影的《Pixie Hollow Online》时,我们最初设计了玩家参与电影中的许多行动。他们可以帮助动物、从大自然中收获物品、为其他仙女制作礼物、帮助著名的仙女解决人际关系问题等等。我们自豪地将这个设计带给一群年轻女孩,以了解她们的兴趣。令我们尴尬的是,她们说“这些事情看起来很有趣……但我真正想做的是飞翔!”我们忽略了飞行这一重要行动,因为它在电影剧本中并不重要。它只是从一项活动过渡到另一项活动的一种方式。因此,在我们的设计中,飞行只发生在过场动画中。但当我们退一步思考时,很明显,要实现像小叮当一样成为仙女的幻想,主要的游戏动作应该是飞行。值得庆幸的是,女孩们及时纠正了我们,让我们还有时间做出改变。在游戏的最终版本中,玩家在所有活动期间都会不断飞行,我们特别关注飞行的感觉,以便以令人愉悦的方式实现幻想。

Action: Once you have your fantasy clearly articulated, you next want to think about what player actions are best suited to fulfilling that fantasy. In the development of Pixie Hollow Online, which was based in part on the Disney Tinkerbell movie, we had an initial design where players engaged in many of the actions from the movie. They could help animals, harvest items from nature, make gifts for other fairies, help famous fairies solve interpersonal problems, and many other things. We proudly brought this design to a focus group of young girls to gauge their interest. To our embarrassment, they said “these things seem interesting… but what I really want to do is fly!” We had overlooked flying as an important action, because it was of minimal importance in the movie script. It was just a way of transitioning from one activity to another. And so, in our design, flying only happened in cut scenes. But when we took a step back, it became obvious that to fulfill the fantasy of being a fairy like Tinkerbell, the primary game action should be flying. Thankfully, the girls set us straight while we still had time to make the change. In the final version of the game, players would fly constantly, during all of their activities, and we gave special attention to the feel of the flight, so that it would fulfill the fantasy in a delightful way.

经济:现在您已经有了一系列可以切实实现吸引人的幻想的行动,现在您需要一个进度系统​​来奖励这些行动,尤其是那些最能实现幻想的行动。正如我们在第 13 章平衡中所讨论的那样,游戏经济是由赚钱和花钱来定义的。最简单的游戏经济实际上只是赚钱——赚取积分、获得进入下一关的权限、赢得胜利。很容易在游戏中奖励错误的东西。例如,也许您创建了一个以成为忍者的幻想为中心的游戏。您选择的动作包括投掷忍者飞镖、偷袭敌人和用忍者剑打击敌人,这些动作有助于实现这种幻想。但是,如果您不小心设计了关卡,玩家必须费力地记住隐藏陷阱的位置才能获胜,那么您就是在奖励那些与成为忍者的幻想背道而驰的行为。在Pixie Hollow Online示例中,我们希望玩家能够从许多不同的任务中获得进度,并能够使用收入获得新服装,与他们的仙女一起玩装扮游戏。但是……仙女应该有钱吗?“仙女币”似乎直接违背了仙女的幻想。像易货系统这样的系统似乎更符合仙女的幻想……我们实现了这一点:多种货币系统。一家仙女店可能会用五根松针换一双拖鞋,用两颗蓝莓换一条发带,用六片百合花瓣换一条裙子。这创造了一个符合仙女幻想的经济,并鼓励了我们想要的行为:想要这些物品的玩家会飞去寻宝,看看在 Pixie Hollow 哪里可以赚到他们所需要的东西。

Economy: Now that you have a set of actions that solidly fulfill an appealing fantasy, now you need a system of progress that will reward those actions, especially those actions that best fulfill the fantasy. As we discussed in Chapter 13: Balance, game economies are defined by earning and spending. The simplest game economies are really just about earning—earning points, earning access to the next level, earning a win. It is easy to reward the wrong things in your game. For example, maybe you create a game centered on the fantasy of being a ninja. You choose actions like throwing ninja stars, sneaking up on enemies, and striking enemies with a ninja sword, which help fulfill that fantasy. However, if you accidentally design levels where in order to win, players must tediously memorize the locations of hidden traps, you are rewarding actions that work against the fantasy of being a ninja. In the Pixie Hollow Online example, we wanted players to earn progress from many different tasks and be able to use the earnings to get new outfits to play dress-up with their fairy. But… should fairies have money? “Fairybucks” felt like they went directly against the fantasy of being a fairy. Something like a barter system felt like it would fit the fairy fantasy much better… and we implemented just that: a system of many currencies. A given fairy shop might offer a pair of slippers for five pine needles, a hair ribbon for two blueberries, and a dress for six lily petals. This created an economy that matched the fantasy of being a fairy, and encouraged the actions we wanted: players desiring these items would fly off on a scavenger hunt to find out where in Pixie Hollow they could earn what they needed.

世界:一旦你有了幻想、行动和经济,现在你需要一个让它们有意义的世界。我们将在第 19 章世界中进一步讨论这个问题,但简而言之,你需要创建一个有规则的地方,让你所创造的经济有意义。如果你制作了一款关于跑步的游戏以及跳跃和收集玩家用来交换魔法物品的星星,你应该解释一下这些星星从何而来,以及魔法物品的卖家为什么想要这些星星。而且……魔法物品到底是从哪里来的?这套关于你的世界如何运作的规则还不是故事……故事是一系列事件。世界是一个按照某些规则运作的地方。如果你的世界规则与你的经济规则不符,你的游戏的一切都会让人感觉空洞和虚假。

World: Once you have your fantasy, your actions, and your economy in place, now you need a world where they make sense. We will talk more about this soon in Chapter 19: Worlds, but in short, you need to create a place with rules where the economy you have created makes sense. If you’ve made a game all about running and jumping and collecting stars that the player trades in for magical items, you should have some explanation of where these stars came from and why the sellers of the magical items want the stars. And… where did the magical items come from, anyway? This set of rules about how your world works is not yet story… a story is a series of events. A world is a place that operates by certain rules. If the rules of your world do not match the rules of your economy, everything about your game will feel hollow and fake.

故事:最后,我们来到了故事的顶端。现在我们有了坚实的幻想、实现幻想的行动、奖励这些行动的经济体系以及证明这种经济体系合理性的世界,我们终于可以开始开发故事了。故事应该让我们创造的世界变得有意义,玩家的行动和进步也很重要。正如我们将在下一个技巧中看到的那样,故事几乎具有无限的灵活性,可以让最奇怪的情况看起来可以理解和正常。尽管有这种灵活性,但故事仍然总是想要接管故事堆栈。当故事得逞时,它将奴役整个游戏设计过程。故事不应该是游戏的主人,而应该是一个心甘情愿的仆人,利用其灵活性创造尽可能最好的游戏体验。如果你发现自己或团队中的某个人说“我们不能这样做……这违背了故事”,这是一个明确的信号,故事欺骗了你、困住了你并接管了你的游戏。

Story: And, at last, here we are at the top of the stack. Now that we have a solid fantasy, actions that fulfill it, an economy that rewards those actions, and a world that justifies that economy, we are at last ready to develop our story. It should be a story that makes the world we’ve created make sense, and a story where the player actions and progress are important. As we’ll see in the next tip, story has an almost infinite flexibility to make even the strangest situations seem understandable and normal. Despite this flexibility, story still always wants to take over the story stack. When story gets its way, it will enslave the entire process of game design. Story should not be the master of the game but rather a willing servant, using its flexibility to create the greatest game experience possible. If ever you find yourself, or someone on your team, saying “we can’t do that… it goes against the story,” it is a clear signal that story has tricked you, trapped you, and taken over your game.

这就是为什么尊重故事堆栈如此重要。无论你从哪里开始设计,你都要在地上打下一根桩子。在地上打下故事桩子是愚蠢的——因为现在,不知何故,你必须把僵化的幻想拖到桩子放好的地方。另一方面,如果你找到一个强大但僵化的幻想,并在那里打下你的桩子,那么当你建立起其他元素时,你就可以轻松地编造一个故事来解释为什么你的桩子就在那个地方。这引出了故事技巧#2。

And this is why it is so important to respect the story stack. Wherever you begin with your design, you place a stake in the ground. Placing a story stake in the ground is foolish—because now, somehow, you will have to drag inflexible fantasy to where that stake has been placed. On the other hand, if you find a powerful, but inflexible fantasy, and put your stake there, then when you have built up the other elements, you can easily craft a story that explains why your stake is exactly where it is. And that leads us to story tip #2.

故事提示#2:让你的故事发挥作用!

Story Tip #2: Put Your Story to Work!

正如我们在第 5 章元素中讨论的那样,可以从四要素中的任何一个角落开始设计——故事、游戏玩法、技术或美学。许多设计都是从故事开始的。过于盲目地遵循故事而忽略其他元素是一个常见的错误——而且是一个特别愚蠢的错误,因为故事在某些方面是所有元素中最灵活的!故事元素通常只需几句话就可以改变,而改变游戏玩法元素可能需要数周的平衡,而改变技术元素可能需要数月的重新编程。

As we discussed in Chapter 5: Elements, it is possible to start a design in any corner of the tetrad—story, gameplay, technology, or aesthetics. And many designs begin with a story. Following that story too slavishly, at the expense of the other elements, is a common mistake—and an especially silly one, since story is, in some ways, the most pliable of all the elements! Story elements can often be changed with just a few words, where changing elements of gameplay might take weeks of balancing, and changing elements of technology might take months of reprogramming.

我曾经听一些 3DO 游戏的开发人员谈论他们遇到的一些开发难题。他们的游戏涉及乘坐宇宙飞船飞越一颗行星并击落敌舰。游戏是 3D 的,为了保持性能,他们无法绘制远处的地形。为了防止地形出现时看起来很奇怪,他们计划使用让世界雾蒙蒙的老办法。但由于 3D 硬件的一些怪癖,他们唯一能做的雾是一种看起来完全不真实的怪异绿色。最初,团队认为他们不得不放弃这个解决方案,突然间,故事拯救了我们!有人认为,也许邪恶的外星人占领了地球,并用有毒气体覆盖了地球。故事中的这一小小变化突然使支持所需游戏机制的技术方法完全成为可能。作为副作用,它可以说是改进了故事,使外星人的占领看起来更加戏剧化。

I once heard some developers of a 3DO game talk about some development headaches they were having. Their game involved flying over a planet in a spaceship and shooting down enemy ships. The game was 3D, and to maintain performance, they could not afford to draw distant terrain. To keep the terrain from looking strange when it popped in, they had planned to use the old trick of making the world foggy. But due to some quirk of the 3D hardware, the only fog they could make was a weird green color that looked completely unrealistic. Initially, the team assumed they would have to scrap this solution, when suddenly, story to the rescue! Someone had the idea that maybe the evil aliens who had taken over the planet had done so by shrouding it with toxic gas. This little change in the story suddenly made a technical approach that supported the desired gameplay mechanic completely possible. As a side effect, it arguably improved the story, making the alien takeover seem all the more dramatic.

我在开发《莫达克的复仇》棋盘游戏时也有过类似的经历。我最初设计的游戏玩法要求玩家在棋盘上四处游走,收集五把钥匙。当他们收集到所有五把钥匙后,他们必须前往邪恶巫师莫达克的要塞,打开要塞并与他战斗。在游戏测试中,很快发现如果莫达克能以某种方式来到收集钥匙的玩家身边,那将是一个更好的游戏机制,因为这样更直接,而且这意味着与莫达克的战斗可以在各种地形中进行。但我很担心,因为这样故事就没有任何意义了。所以,再次,故事来拯救我!如果莫达克有一个无人能找到的秘密要塞会怎么样?玩家不必收集钥匙,而是必须收集五块召唤石?当收集到所有五块钥匙后,莫达克可以立即被召唤出他的要塞,并被迫在玩家当前所在的任何地形上与玩家战斗。这个简单的故事变化使理想的游戏玩法成为可能。它也比我那篇有些陈腐的“城堡里的恶棍”故事更新颖。

I had a similar experience developing my Mordak’s Revenge board game. My initial design for the gameplay required players to travel about the board, collecting five keys. When they had all five, they had to journey to the stronghold of the evil wizard Mordak to unlock the stronghold and battle him. In playtests, it quickly became clear that it would be a better game mechanic if Mordak could somehow come to the player who had collected the keys, since it was more immediate, and it meant that the battle against Mordak could be fought in a variety of terrains. But I was troubled because then the story didn’t make any sense. So, once again, story to the rescue! What if, instead, Mordak had a secret stronghold that no one could find? And instead of collecting keys, the players had to collect five summoning stones? When all five were collected, Mordak could be summoned immediately out of his stronghold and forced to battle the player in whatever terrain the player was currently in. This simple change to the story made the desired gameplay possible. It also was more novel than my somewhat trite “villain in the castle” story.

始终牢记故事可以多么灵活、灵活和强大——不要害怕塑造你的故事来支持你认为最好的游戏玩法。

Always keep in mind how limber, flexible, and powerful a story can be—don’t be afraid to mold your story to support the gameplay you think is best.

故事提示3:目标、障碍和冲突

Story Tip #3: Goals, Obstacles, and Conflicts

好莱坞剧本创作有一句古老的格言:故事的主要要素是(1)一个有目标的角色,以及(2)阻止他或她实现目标的障碍。

It is an old maxim of Hollywood screenwriting that the main ingredients for a story are (1) a character with a goal and (2) obstacles that keep him or her from reaching that goal.

当角色试图克服障碍时,有趣的冲突往往会出现,尤其是当另一个角色的目标与之相冲突时。这种简单的模式导致了非常有趣的故事,因为这意味着角色必须参与解决问题(我们发现这非常有趣);因为冲突会导致不可预测的结果,换句话说就是惊喜(我们发现这非常有趣);因为障碍越大,发生戏剧性变化的可能性就越大(我们发现这非常有趣)。

As the character tries to overcome the obstacles, interesting conflicts tend to arise, particularly when another character has a conflicting goal. This simple pattern leads to very interesting stories because it means the character has to engage in problem solving (which we find very interesting); because conflicts lead to unpredictable results, in other words surprises (which we find very interesting); and because the bigger the obstacle, the bigger the potential for dramatic change (which we find very interesting).

这些要素在创作电子游戏故事时是否同样有用?当然有用,甚至可能更有用。我们已经讨论过镜头 #32目标——如果你选择创建一条珍珠链,主角的目标将是玩家的目标,并且将成为让他们沿着珍珠链前进的驱动力。角色遇到的障碍将是玩家面临的挑战。如果你想让你的游戏有一个完整的故事,那么将这些要素结合起来非常重要——如果你给玩家的挑战与主角面临的障碍无关,那么你就大大削弱了体验。但如果你能够找到一种方法,让游戏挑战变得有意义,并为主角设置戏剧性的障碍,你的故事和游戏结构就会融为一体,这在很大程度上会让玩家感觉自己是故事的一部分。我们已经有了目标镜头——这是它的姊妹镜头。

Are these ingredients just as useful when creating videogame stories? Absolutely—and maybe even more so. We’ve already discussed Lens #32: Goals—the goal of the main character will be the goal of the player and will be the driving force that keeps them moving along the string of pearls, if you choose to create one. And the obstacles that character meets will be the challenges the player faces. If you want your game to have a solidly integrated story, it is very important that these things line up—if you give the player a challenge that has nothing to do with the obstacles the main character faces, you have just weakened the experience considerably. But if you can find a way to make the challenges of the game meaningful, as well as dramatic obstacles for the main character, your story and game structure will fuse into one, which goes a long way toward making the player feel like part of the story. We already have a Lens of Goals—here is its sister lens.

故事提示#4:让故事变得真实

Story Tip #4: Make It Real

了解你的世界就像上帝了解这个世界一样。

—罗伯特·麦基

Know your world as God knows this one.

—Robert McKee

为一个幻想世界想出一个故事情节、一个角色列表和一套规则是一回事。在脑海中看到它,就像它是一个真实的地方一样,又是另一回事。要到达那里,你必须不断地思考,想象你是世界上生活的角色之一。迪士尼游乐设施设计的秘诀之一是,每个体验,如鬼屋或飞溅山,都有一个精心设计的背景故事不与公众分享,但所有设计师都知道,并用它来保持世界的完整性。托尔金不是某天坐下来就写《指环王》的;相反,他花了数年时间想象和记录中土世界、它的历史、人民和语言,然后故事才真正开始成形。这种程度的详细规划很少是必要的,但如果你不能回答关于你的世界的历史和你角色的动机的基本问题,它就会在你的作品中表现出来,人们就会看到它的本质:缺乏想象力。永远记住:如果它对你来说不是真实的,那么对别人来说也不是真实的。

It is one thing to come up with a plot line, a list of characters, and a set of rules for a fantasy world. It is something else again to see it in your mind, as if it is a real place. To get there, you must think about it constantly, imagining you are one of the characters living in the world. One of the secrets of ride design at Disney is that each experience, such as the Haunted Mansion or Splash Mountain, has an elaborate backstory that is not shared with the public, but all the designers know it and they use it to keep the world solid. Tolkien did not simply sit down and write The Lord of the Rings one day; instead, he spent years imagining and documenting the world of Middle Earth, its history, people, and languages before the stories really began to take shape. That level of detailed planning is seldom necessary, but if you can’t answer basic questions about the history of your world and the motivations of your characters, it will show in your work, and people will see it for what it is: unimaginative. Always remember: If it’s not real to you, it’s not real to them.

故事提示#5:提供简单性和超越性

Story Tip #5: Provide Simplicity and Transcendence

游戏世界和幻想世界往往有一个共同点,那就是它们为玩家提供了简单性(游戏世界比现实世界简单)和超越性(玩家在游戏世界中比在现实世界中更强大)的结合。这种强大的组合解释了为什么游戏中会反复出现这么多类型的故事世界,例如:

One thing that game worlds and fantasy worlds tend to have in common is that they offer the player a combination of simplicity (the game world is simpler than the real world) and transcendence (the player is more powerful in the game world than they are in the real world). This potent combination explains why so many types of story worlds show up again and again in games, such as the following:

  • 中世纪:剑与魔法世界的潮流似乎永无止境。这些世界比我们所知的世界更简单,因为技术很原始。但它们很少是对中世纪的准确模拟——几乎总是会添加某种魔法,这提供了超越性。这种类型的持续成功肯定源于它以如此原始的方式将简单与超越结合在一起。

  • Medieval: The stream of swords and sorcery worlds seems to be never ending. These worlds are simpler than the world we know, because the technologies are primitive. But they are seldom accurate simulations of medieval times—there is almost always some kind of magic added, and this provides the transcendence. The continued success of this genre surely stems from the fact that it combines the simple and the transcendent in such a primal way.

  • 未来主义:许多游戏和科幻故事都设定在未来。但这些故事很少是对我们可能看到的未来的任何现实诠释——未来会继续向郊区扩张,汽车更安全,工作时间更长,手机套餐也越来越复杂。不——我们在这些世界中看到的未来通常更像是世界末日后的未来;换句话说,炸弹爆炸了,或者我们身处某个陌生的边境星球,世界要简单得多。当然,我们可以使用足够先进的技术——正如亚瑟·克拉克所说,这些技术与魔法无异——至少在超越性方面是如此。

  • Futuristic: Many games and science fiction stories are set in the future. But these very seldom are any kind of realistic interpretation of the future we are likely to see—one with continued suburban sprawl, safer cars, longer work hours, and ever more complicated cell phone plans. No—the future that we see in these worlds is usually more of a post-apocalyptic future; in other words, a bomb went off, or we are on some strange frontier planet, and the world is much simpler. And of course we have access to sufficiently advanced technologies—which, as Arthur C. Clarke noted, are indistinguishable from magic—at least in terms of transcendence.

  • 战争:战争中,一切都变得简单,因为所有正常的规则和法律都被抛在一边。而超越则来自于强大的武器,它让参与者变得像神一样,决定谁生谁死。这在现实中是一种恐怖,但在幻想中,它给玩家带来了强烈的简单和超越感。

  • War: In war, things are simpler, since all normal rules and laws are set aside. And the transcendence comes from a powerful weaponry that lets participants become like gods, deciding who lives and who dies. It is a horror in reality, but in fantasy it gives a player powerful feelings of simplicity and transcendence.

  • 现代:现代背景对于游戏故事来说并不常见,除非玩家突然拥有比平时更强大的力量。这可以通过多种方式实现。《侠盗猎车手》系列利用犯罪生活赋予了简单性(当你不遵守法律时,生活会更简单)和超越性(当你不遵守法律时,你会更强大)。《模拟人生》创造了一个简化的玩具屋它是一种与人类生命等同的虚拟生命形式,并赋予玩家超凡的神力来控制游戏中的角色。

  • Modern: Modern settings are unusual for game stories, unless the player suddenly has surprisingly more power than normal. This can be accomplished in many ways. The Grand Theft Auto series uses criminal life to give both simplicity (life is simpler when you don’t obey laws) and transcendence (you are more powerful when you don’t obey laws). The Sims creates a simplified dollhouse version of human life, and it gives the player transcendent godlike powers to control the characters in the game.

  • 摘要:抽象世界,例如 Minecraft,不仅比现实世界简单,而且比普通的电子游戏更简单!正如 Notch 发现的那样,将这种简单性与创造和毁灭的神力相结合可以创造出一款相当成功的游戏。

  • Abstract: Abstract worlds, such as Minecraft, are not only simpler than the real world; they are simpler than the average videogame! As Notch discovered, combining that simplicity with the godlike power to create and destroy can create a pretty successful game.

简单与超越形成了一种强大的组合,但很容易被搞砸。使用此镜头可确保将它们完美地结合在一起。

Simplicity and transcendence form a powerful combination that is easily botched. Use this lens to make sure you combine them just right.

故事提示#6:思考英雄的旅程

Story Tip #6: Consider the Hero’s Journey

1949 年,神话学家约瑟夫·坎贝尔出版了他的第一本书《千面英雄》。在书中,他描述了大多数神话故事似乎都具有的一种基本结构,他称之为单一神话或英雄之旅。他详细描述了这种结构如何构成摩西、佛陀、基督、奥德修斯、普罗米修斯、奥西里斯等众多神话故事的基础。许多作家和艺术家从坎贝尔的作品中获得了极大的灵感。最著名的是,乔治·卢卡斯根据坎贝尔描述的结构设计了《星球大战》的结构,并取得了巨大的成功。

In 1949, mythologist Joseph Campbell published his first book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In this text, he describes an underlying structure that most mythological stories seem to share, which he calls the monomyth, or hero’s journey. He goes into great detail about how this structure underlies the stories of Moses, Buddha, Christ, Odysseus, Prometheus, Osiris, and many others. Many writers and artists found great inspiration in Campbell’s work. Most famously, George Lucas based the structure of Star Wars around structures Campbell described, with great success.

1992 年,好莱坞编剧兼制片人克里斯托弗·沃格勒出版了一本名为《作家之旅》的书,这是一本使用坎贝尔所描述的原型创作故事的实用指南。沃格勒的书并不像坎贝尔的文本那样学术性十足,但对于想要使用英雄之旅作为框架的作家来说,它是一本更易于理解和实用的指南。据说,创作了《黑客帝国》(该片明显遵循了英雄之旅模型)的瓦卓斯基姐妹就以沃格勒的书为指南。尽管这本书易于理解,但它经常被批评为过于公式化和将太多故事强行塞入一个公式中。尽管如此,许多人发现它为他们提供了有关英雄故事结构的有用见解。

In 1992, Christopher Vogler, a Hollywood writer and producer, published a book called The Writer’s Journey, which was a practical guide to writing stories using the archetypes that Campbell describes. Vogler’s book is not as scholarly as Campbell’s text, but it serves as a far more accessible and practical guide for writers who would like to use the hero’s journey as a framework. The Wachowskis, who wrote The Matrix (which rather clearly follows the hero’s journey model), are said to have used Vogler’s book as a guide. As accessible as the text is, it is often criticized for being over-formulaic and for shoehorning too many stories into a single formula. Nonetheless, many people find it gives them useful insights into the structure of heroic stories.

由于许多电子游戏都围绕英雄主义主题展开,因此英雄之旅自然是精彩电子游戏故事的重要结构。由于已有数本书和大量网站描述了如何围绕英雄之旅构建故事,因此我在此仅作概述。

Because so many videogames revolve around a theme of heroism, it is only logical that the hero’s journey is a relevant structure for a powerful videogame story. Since several books and a plethora of websites already exist describing how to structure a story around the hero’s journey, I will only give an overview of it here.

沃格勒的英雄之旅概要
  1. 平凡的世界——建立场景来展现我们的英雄是一个过着平凡生活的普通人。

  2. The ordinary world—Establishing scenes that show our hero is a regular person leading an ordinary life.

  3. 冒险的召唤——英雄面临着一场扰乱他们日常生活的挑战。

  4. The call to adventure—The hero is presented with a challenge that disrupts their ordinary life.

  5. 拒绝召唤——英雄为他们不能继续冒险找借口。

  6. Refusal of the call—The hero makes excuses about why they can’t go on the adventure.

  7. 与导师会面——一些智者提供建议、培训或帮助。

  8. Meeting with the mentor—Some wise figure gives advice, training, or aid.

  9. 跨越门槛——英雄离开平凡世界(通常迫于压力),进入冒险世界。

  10. Crossing the threshold—The hero leaves the ordinary world (often under pressure) and enters the adventure world.

  11. 考验、盟友、敌人——英雄面临小挑战、结交盟友、对抗敌人并了解冒险世界的运作方式。

  12. Tests, allies, enemies—The hero faces minor challenges, makes allies, confronts enemies, and learns the workings of the adventure world.

  13. 接近洞穴——英雄遭遇挫折,需要尝试一些新的事情。

  14. Approaching the cave—The hero encounters setbacks and needs to try something new.

  15. 考验——英雄面临生死危机。

  16. The ordeal—The hero faces a peak life or death crisis.

  17. 奖励——英雄幸存下来,克服恐惧,并获得奖励。

  18. The reward—The hero survives, overcomes their fear, and gets the reward.

  19. 回归之路——英雄回归平凡世界,但问题仍未全部解决。

  20. The road back—The hero returns to the ordinary world, but the problems still aren’t all solved.

  21. 复活——英雄面临更大的危机,必须运用自己所学到的一切。

  22. Resurrection—The hero faces a still greater crisis and has to use everything they have learned.

  23. 带着灵药归来——如今,旅程已经圆满结束,英雄的成功也改善了平凡世界中每个人的生活。

  24. Returning with the elixir—The journey is now well and truly complete, and the hero’s success has improved the lives of everyone in the ordinary world.

你绝对不需要在你的英雄故事中涵盖所有这十二个步骤——你可以用更少或更多或以不同的顺序来讲述一个好的英雄故事。

By no means do you need to have all twelve of these steps in your heroic story—you can tell a good heroic story with fewer or more or in a different order.

附注一下,通过镜头#69兴趣曲线来观察英雄的旅程是一个有趣的练习——你会看到一个熟悉的形式出现。

As a side note, it is an interesting exercise to look at the hero’s journey through Lens #69: Interest Curve—you will see a familiar form emerge.

有些讲故事的人非常反感用公式来讲述好的故事。但英雄的旅程并不是一个公式,保证能产生一个有趣的故事;相反,它是许多有趣的故事倾向于采用的一种形式。把它想象成一个骨架。就像人类虽然都有相同的 208 根骨头,但仍然具有巨大的多样性一样,英雄故事可以有数百万种形式,尽管有一些共同的内部结构。

Some storytellers take great offense at the idea that good storytelling can be accomplished by formula. But the hero’s journey is not so much a formula, guaranteed to produce an entertaining story; rather, it is a form that many entertaining stories tend to take. Think of it as a skeleton. Just as humans have tremendous variety despite all of us having the same 208 bones, heroic stories can take millions of forms despite some common internal structure.

大多数讲故事的人似乎都同意,用英雄的旅程作为写作的起点并不是一个好主意。正如鲍勃·贝茨所说:

Most storytellers seem to agree that using the hero’s journey as a starting point for your writing isn’t a very good idea. As Bob Bates puts it:

《英雄之旅》并不是一盒可以解决所有故事问题的工具。但它有点像电路测试仪。你可以用导线夹住故事中的问题点,检查是否有足够的神话电流流动。如果电流不足,它可以帮助指出问题的根源。

The Hero’s Journey isn’t a box of tools you can use to fix every story problem. But it’s somewhat similar to a circuit tester. You can clamp the leads around a problem spot in your story and check to see if there’s enough mythical current flowing. And if you don’t have enough juice, it can help point out the source of the problem.

最好先写好你的故事,如果你注意到它可能与单一神话的元素有共同之处,那么花点时间考虑一下你的故事是否可以通过更紧密地遵循原型结构和元素来改进。换句话说,用英雄的旅程作为镜头。

Better to write your story first, and if you notice that it might have something in common with elements of the monomyth, then spend some time considering whether your story might be improved by following archetypical structures and elements more closely. In other words, use the hero’s journey as a lens.

故事技巧7:保持故事世界的一致性

Story Tip #7: Keep Your Story World Consistent

法国有句古老的谚语说:

There is an old French saying that goes:

如果你在一桶污水里加一勺酒,

你得到一桶污水。

If you add a spoonful of wine to a barrelful of sewage,

you get a barrelful of sewage.

如果你在一桶酒里加入一勺污水,

你得到一桶污水。

If you add a spoonful of sewage to a barrelful of wine,

you get a barrelful of sewage.

从某种程度上来说,故事世界就像一桶酒一样脆弱。只要世界逻辑出现一点小矛盾,现实世界就会永远崩塌。好莱坞用“jumping the shark”这个词来形容一部已经衰败到再也无法被认真对待的电视节目。这个词指的是 70 年代流行的电视剧《Happy Days》。作为一季的结局,编剧让剧中最受欢迎的角色方齐骑着摩托车跳过一排校车。这一集大肆宣传,收视率极高。在下一季中,为了重复这一成功,并借助电影《大白鲨》的受欢迎程度,他们让滑水的方齐跳过一条鲨鱼。这太荒谬了,与方齐的角色相差甚远,让该剧的粉丝们感到厌恶。问题不在于某一集的前提荒谬,而在于这个角色和他的世界永远被玷污了,再也无法被认真对待。还有一个例子: 《质量效应 3》发布后不久,许多玩家抱怨他们对三部曲的结局感到失望。创作者对此作出回应,宣布他们将发布一个补丁来改变结局。这引起了轩然大波,证明了故事的质量不如故事真实的幻觉重要。一致性上的一个小错误可能会导致整个世界分崩离析,损害它的过去、现在和未来。

In some ways, story worlds are fragile like the barrelful of wine. One small inconsistency in the logic of the world, and the reality of the world is broken forever. In Hollywood, the term “jumping the shark” is used to describe a television show that has deteriorated to a point that it can never be taken seriously again. The term is a reference to the popular seventies show Happy Days. As a season finale, the writers had Fonzie, the most popular character in the show, jump over a line of school buses on his motorcycle. The episode was greatly hyped and had excellent ratings. In the next season, in an attempt to repeat this success, and to play off the popularity of the film Jaws, they had a waterskiing Fonzie jump over a shark. This was so ridiculous, and so far out of Fonzie’s character, that fans of the show were repulsed. The problem was not so much that one particular episode had a ridiculous premise, but rather that the character and his world were forever tainted and could never be taken seriously again. Here is another example: shortly after the release of Mass Effect 3, many players complained at their disappointment with the ending to the trilogy. The creators responded, announcing they were going to release a patch that changed the ending. This led to a massive uproar, proving that the quality of a story is less important than the illusion that it is real. One small error in consistency can make a whole world break apart, damaging its past, present, and future.

如果你有一套规则来定义你的世界中事物的运作方式,那就坚持下去,认真对待它们。例如,如果你在你的世界中可以拿起微波炉并将其放入口袋中,这可能有点奇怪,但也许在你的世界中,口袋是神奇的,可以容纳各种东西。但是,如果后来玩家试图将熨衣板放入口袋中并被告知“它太大了,你拿不动”,玩家就会感到沮丧,不再认真对待你的故事世界,也不再将他们的想象力投射到其中。无形中,在眨眼之间,你的世界将从一个真实、活跃的地方变成一个悲伤、破损的玩具。

If you have a set of rules that define how things work in your world, stick with them, and take them seriously. If, for example, in your world you can pick up a microwave oven and put it in your pocket, that might be a little strange, but maybe in your world, pockets are magic and can hold all kinds of things. If later, though, a player tries to put an ironing board in their pocket and is told “that is too big for you to carry,” the player will be frustrated, will stop taking your story world seriously, and will stop projecting their imagination into it. Invisibly, in the blink of an eye, your world will have changed from a real, live place to a sad, broken toy.

故事技巧#8:让你的故事世界更容易理解

Story Tip #8: Make Your Story World Accessible

儒勒·凡尔纳在他的经典童话《从地球到月球》(1865 年)中讲述了三个人乘坐巨型大炮发射的宇宙飞船前往月球的故事。尽管这本书详细介绍了大炮的科学原理,但这个前提在现代人看来似乎很荒谬,因为任何足以发射宇宙飞船的大炮爆炸都必定会杀死里面的所有人。我们从经验中知道,火箭是一种更安全、更现实的将人类送上月球的方法。人们可能会认为凡尔纳在他的故事中没有使用火箭,因为那时火箭还没有被发明——但事实并非如此。火箭在当时被广泛用作武器——例如,想想《星条旗之歌》(1814 年)中的“火箭的红色眩光”。

In Jules Verne’s classic tale, From the Earth to the Moon (1865), he tells the story of three men who travel to the moon in a spaceship fired from a giant cannon. Despite the fact that the book goes into great detail about the science of the cannon, the premise seems ridiculous to modern eyes because any cannon blast powerful enough to launch a spacecraft would surely kill everyone inside. We know from experience that rockets are a far safer and realistic method of sending people to the moon. One might think that Verne did not use rockets in his story because they had not yet been invented—but this was not the case. Rockets were commonly used as weapons at that time—consider the “rockets’ red glare” in “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814), for instance.

所以,凡尔纳肯定知道火箭,而且他似乎有足够的科学头脑,意识到火箭是比大炮更合理的将飞船送入太空的方法。那么他为什么要这样写故事呢?答案似乎是这样更容易被他的读者接受。

So, surely Verne knew about rockets, and he seems to have had enough of a scientific mind to realize that they were a much more reasonable method of putting a craft into space than a cannon would be. So why did he write his story this way? The answer seems to be that it was much more accessible to his audience.

回顾十九世纪军事技术的进步。首先,考虑一下火箭:

Consider the progressions of military technology over the course of the nineteenth century. First, consider rockets:

  • 1812 年:威廉·康格里夫的火箭:直径 6.5 英寸,重 42 磅,射程两英里

  • 1812: William Congreve’s rockets: 6.5″ diameter, 42 pounds, two-mile range

  • 1840 年:威廉·黑尔的火箭:与康格里夫的火箭相同,但精确度略高

  • 1840: William Hale’s rockets: same as Congreve’s but slightly more accurate

在近三十年的时间里,火箭没有任何增长,只有轻微的改进。

In nearly thirty years, rockets showed no growth and only slight improvement.

但现在考虑一下大炮:

But now consider cannons:

  • 1855 年:达尔格伦的枪:100 磅炮弹,射程 3 英里

  • 1855: Dahlgren’s gun: 100-pound shell, three mile range

  • 1860 年:罗德曼的“哥伦比亚”号:1000 磅炮弹,射程 6 英里

  • 1860: Rodman’s Columbiad: 1000-pound shell, six mile range

仅仅五年时间,炮弹的尺寸就增加了十倍!考虑到 1865 年美国内战成为国际头条新闻,只需稍加想象就能想象到未来几年内会出现更大、威力更大的大炮——可能大到可以发射到月球的炮弹。

In a mere five years, the size of a cannon shell had increased by ten times! Keeping in mind that the American Civil War was making international headlines in 1865, it only took a small leap of the imagination to picture even larger and more powerful cannons appearing within the next few years—possibly large enough to fire shells clear to the moon.

凡尔纳当然知道火箭是人类登月最有可能的方法——但他是一个讲故事的人,而不是科学家,他有敏锐的洞察力,知道在讲故事时,事实并不总是你的朋友。玩家会相信和享受什么比物理上的准确性更重要。

Verne surely understood that rockets were the most likely method of man reaching the moon—but he was a storyteller, not a scientist, and he had the good sense to know that when you are telling a story, facts aren’t always your friends. What the player will believe and enjoy is more important that what is physically accurate.

当我在《加勒比海盗:海盗金币之战》中工作时,这个原则的几个例子就出现了。一个是船的速度——最初,我们煞费苦心地确保我们的海盗船以现实的速度行驶。但我们很快发现,这个速度太慢了(或者说,在我们离水面的高度,它看起来很慢),玩家很快就会感到无聊。所以,我们把现实抛到九霄云外,让船以感觉真实和令人兴奋的速度行驶,尽管它根本不现实。另一个例子可以在游戏截图中清楚地看到:

When I worked on Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold, several examples of this principle arose. One was the speed of the boat—initially, we took pains to make sure our pirate ship traveled at a realistic speed. But we quickly found that this speed was so slow (or appeared to be, at our height from the water) that players quickly became bored. So, we cast reality to the winds, as it were, and just made the boat go at a speed that felt realistic and exciting, even though it was not realistic at all. Another example can be clearly seen in this screenshot from the game:



17.5

FIGURE

17.5

(由迪士尼企业公司提供,已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)

看看那些船,想想风在往哪个方向吹。奇怪的是,风似乎都在船的后面。事实也确实如此。在动作游戏中,要求玩家理解如何顺风驾驶船实在是太过分了——而且从来没有玩家问过我们这个问题;他们只是假设船像汽车或摩托艇一样行驶,因为他们熟悉这些。作为一个小细节,考虑一下船桅杆顶部的旗帜——它们被吹向与船帆相反的方向!船的建模者最初让它们朝向正确的方向,但这对我们的游戏测试员来说看起来很奇怪,因为他们更习惯看到旗帜在汽车天线上飘扬,而不是在船桅杆上飘扬。我们的玩家经常会问为什么旗帜指向错误的方向,我们会解释:“不,你看,风是从船后面吹来的……”他们会说“哦……嗯……我想是对的。”但过了一段时间,我们厌倦了解释它,所以我们只是让旗帜指向另一个方向,人们不再询问它们,因为现在它们看起来“正常”。

Look at those boats and consider which way the wind is blowing. Weirdly, it seems to be behind all of them. And indeed it is. To ask players to understand how to sail a ship with the wind was simply too much to ask in an action game—and no player ever asked us about that; they simply assumed that the boats drove like cars or motorboats, because that is what they were familiar with. As a minor detail, consider the flags at the top of the ship masts—they are being blown in the opposite direction as the sails! The modeler of the ships initially had them facing the correct way, but it looked strange to our playtesters, who were more used to seeing a flag flying on a car antenna than on a ship’s mast. Our players would frequently ask why the flags pointed the wrong way, and we would explain: “No, see, the wind is blowing from behind the ships…” and they would say “Oh… hmm…. I guess that’s right.” But after a while, we got tired of explaining it, so we just made the flags point the other way, and people stopped asking about them, because now they looked “normal.”

不过,有时你的故事需要一些玩家从未见过的奇怪的东西,而这些东西无法轻易获得。在这种情况下,你必须特别注意那个东西,让玩家明白它是什么,它是如何工作的。我曾经有一个学生团队,他们做了一个小游戏,讲的是宠物店里的两只仓鼠相爱了,但由于被关在不同的笼子里而无法见面。他们的游戏让玩家使用一个小仓鼠大炮试图把男仓鼠发射到女仓鼠的笼子里。有人向他们指出,仓鼠大炮这种东西是不存在的,结果这个故事看起来有点奇怪,难以置信。一个解决方案是可以将大炮换成其他可以发射小仓鼠的东西,比如仓鼠轮,但团队想要保留大炮,所以他们采取了不同的方法。在宠物店的开场镜头中,他们显著地展示了“特价!仓鼠大炮出售!”的标志。这不仅为体验提供了一个吸引人的噱头,让玩家期待仓鼠大炮的样子,也向玩家介绍了这个非常奇怪的物品,这样当它出现时,就不会显得那么奇怪了——它只是一个不寻常世界的自然组成部分。超现实元素在游戏中并不少见,了解如何顺利整合它们非常重要。一个方便的方法就是使用这个镜头。

There are times, though, that your story requires something strange that the player has never seen before, which can’t be made readily accessible. In these cases, it is very important that you call special attention to that thing and make the players understand what it is and how it works. I once had a team of students who made a little game about two hamsters in a pet store who fall in love but are unable to meet because they are in separate cages. Their game had the player use a little hamster cannon to try to launch the boy hamster to the girl hamster’s cage. It was pointed out to them that there is no such thing as a hamster cannon, and as a result the story seemed kind of strange and hard to believe. One solution would have been to change the cannon to something else that could launch the boy hamster, like perhaps a hamster wheel, but the team wanted to keep the cannon, so they took a different approach. In the establishing shots of the pet shop, they prominently featured signs reading “Special! Hamster Cannons on sale!” This not only served as an intriguing hook for the experience, creating anticipation to see what a hamster cannon would look like, but it introduced this very strange item to the player so that when it showed up, it didn’t seem so strange after all—just a natural part of an unusual world. Surreal elements are not at all uncommon in games, and it is important that you understand how to smoothly integrate them. One handy way to do that is to use this lens.

故事提示#9:明智地使用陈词滥调

Story Tip #9: Use Clichés Judiciously

电子游戏故事似乎无法避免的一个批评是过度使用陈词滥调或比喻。毕竟,你只能从邪恶的外星人手中拯救世界,用你的魔法对抗邪恶的巨龙,或者用​​霰弹枪在满是僵尸的地牢里战斗一定次数,然后才会变得乏味。这促使一些设计师避免任何以前做过的故事设定或主题——有时会推动他们的故事并将其设置成某种非常另类的东西,以至于玩家无法理解它是什么或者根本无法与它联系起来。

One criticism videogame stories seem unable to escape is overuse of clichés, or tropes. After all, you can only save the world from evil aliens, use your wizardry against an evil dragon, or fight a dungeon full of zombies with a shotgun a certain number of times before it becomes tedious. This drives some designers to avoid any story setting or theme that has been done before—sometimes pushing their story and setting into something so offbeat that players are unable to understand what it is or relate to it at all.

尽管陈词滥调很容易被滥用,但它们也有巨大的优势,那就是玩家熟悉,而熟悉的东西是可以理解和领悟的。据说,每款成功的电子游戏都能找到一种将熟悉的东西与新奇的东西结合起来的方法。有些设计师永远不会制作关于忍者的游戏,因为忍者已经被玩烂了。但如果你制作一个关于孤独忍者、无能忍者、忍者狗、机器人忍者或秘密过着忍者生活的三年级女孩的故事,会怎么样?所有这些故事情节都有可能成为新奇而不同的东西,同时吸引玩家已经了解的世界。

For all their potential to be abused, clichés have the tremendous advantage of being familiar to the player, and what is familiar is understandable and comprehensible. It has been said that every successful videogame finds a way to combine something familiar with something novel. Some designers would never make a game about ninjas, because ninjas have been done to death. But what if you made a story about a lonely ninja, an incompetent ninja, a ninja dog, a robotic ninja, or a third-grade girl who leads a secret life as a ninja? All of these storylines have the potential to be something new and different while having a hook into a world the player already understands.

过度使用陈词滥调当然是错误的,但将它们从你的工具箱中剔除也是同样的错误。

It is certainly an error to overuse clichés, but it is an equal error to exile them from your toolbox.

故事提示#10:有时地图可以让故事变得生动

Story Tip #10: Sometimes a Map Brings a Story to Life

当我们想到要写故事时,我们通常会想到文字、人物和情节。但故事可能来自意想不到的地方。罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森 (Robert Louis Stevenson) 并没有打算写出他最伟大的作品:《金银岛》。在一个特别多雨的假期里,为了逗一个小学生开心,他和这个男孩轮流画画。史蒂文森一时兴起,画了一张奇异岛屿的地图,这张地图突然有了自己的生命:

When we think of writing stories, we generally think of words, characters, and plotlines. But stories can come from unexpected places. Robert Louis Stevenson had no intention of writing what is considered his greatest work: Treasure Island. Obligated to entertain a schoolboy during a particularly rainy vacation, he and the boy took turns drawing pictures. On a whim, Stevenson drew a map of a fanciful island, which suddenly took on a life of its own:

…当我停在《金银岛》的地图上时,书中未来的人物开始在想象中的树林中清晰可见地出现;他们棕色的脸和明亮的武器从意想不到的地方向我窥视,他们在这几平方英寸的平面投影上来回穿梭,打斗和寻找宝藏。接下来我知道我面前有一些文件,正在写章节列表。

…as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island’, the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters.

大多数电子游戏并不发生在文字世界中,而是发生在一个物理场所。通过绘制这个地方的草图和图画,故事通常会自然而然地成形,因为你会被迫考虑谁住在那里,他们做什么,以及为什么。

Most videogames do not happen in world of words, but in a physical place. By making sketches and drawings of this place, often a story will naturally take shape, as you are compelled to consider who lives there, what they do, and why.

故事提示#11:惊喜和情感

Story Tip #11: Surprise and Emotion

写故事很难。让故事从游戏中脱颖而出就更难了。但是,一般来说,故事乏味是因为它们缺乏惊喜或情感(或者,哎呀,两者都缺乏!)。如果你发现你的游戏故事乏味,那就拿出你的老朋友,镜头 1情感镜头 4惊喜,并将它们指向你的故事。你自己可能会惊讶和感动于它们的帮助。

Writing stories is hard. Getting them to emerge from games is even harder. But, generally, when stories are dull, it is because they lack surprise or emotion (or, yikes, both!). If you find that your game story is dull, take out your old friends, Lens #1: Emotion and Lens #4: Surprise, and point them at your story. You yourself might be surprised and emotional at how much they help.

关于故事,我们能说的还有很多,我们不可能在这里全部涵盖。但无论你创造的是什么,无论是只有最薄的主题和背景的抽象游戏,还是有数百个详细角色的史诗冒险,你都应该明智地让游戏的故事元素尽可能有意义和强大。所以,我们用一个通用的视角来结束本章,它可以作为研究元素四元组中这个非常重要的象限的工具,使任何游戏受益。

So much more can be said about story that we cannot possibly cover it all here. But whatever you create, whether it be an abstract game with only the thinnest veneer of theme and setting or a vast epic adventure with hundreds of detailed characters, you are wise to make the story elements of your game as meaningful and powerful as possible. So, we end this chapter with a general-purpose lens, which can benefit any game as a tool for studying this very important quadrant of the elemental tetrad.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 游戏角色发展与故事叙述,作者:Lee Sheldon。Lee曾为数十款游戏和电视节目写过剧本。他将自己一生的讲故事经验浓缩在这本非常实用的书中。

  • Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon. Lee has written for dozens of games and just as many television shows. He condenses his lifetime of storytelling experience into this very practical book.

  • Josiah Liebowitz 和 Chris Klug 著的《电子游戏的互动叙事》。两位经验丰富的专业人士就互动叙事提供了更多出色的建议。

  • Interactive Storytelling for Video Games by Josiah Liebowitz and Chris Klug. More excellent advice on interactive storytelling from two experienced professionals.

  • 故事由罗伯特·麦基撰写。这本书被许多人视为好莱坞编剧的圣经,内容清晰、通俗易懂,充满了极好的建议。

  • Story by Robert McKee. Considered by many the bible of Hollywood screenwriting, this book is clear, accessible, and full of excellent advice.

  • 《作家之旅:作家的神话结构》作者:克里斯托弗·沃格勒。这本书以过于公式化而闻名,但它使许多强有力的想法变得易于理解,并为许多伟大的编剧提供了强有力的见解。

  • The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler. This book has a reputation for being too formulaic, but it makes many powerful ideas easy to understand, and it has given powerful insights to many great screenwriters.

  • 数字故事讲述:互动娱乐创作者指南。这本书充满了例子和技巧,更不用说对来自整个行业的互动故事讲述者的深思熟虑的采访了。

  • Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment. This book is chock full of examples and tips, not to mention thoughtful interviews with interactive storytellers from all over the industry.

  • 《小说写作:叙事技巧指南》作者:珍妮特·伯罗威。这本书现已出到第十版,适合任何想要成为伟大的讲故事者和作家的人。它从第一页就征服了我:第一章:只要有用就行

  • Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway. Now in its tenth edition, this book is for anyone serious about becoming a great storyteller and writer. It won me over from the first page: Chapter One: Whatever Works.

第十八

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

故事和游戏结构可以与间接控制巧妙地融合

Story and Game Structures Can Be Artfully Merged with Indirect Control



18.1

FIGURE

18.1



18.2

FIGURE

18.2

1966 年末,音乐家约翰·列侬受邀参加伦敦 Indica 画廊举办的一场名为“未完成的绘画和物品”的艺术展。他对前卫艺术没有特别的兴趣,也从未听说过这位名叫小野洋子的女性艺术家,但当他到达时,一件特别的作品引起了他的注意:房间中央的一架高高的梯子。梯子上方的天花板上挂着一块看似空白的白色画布。梯子上方,天花板上的画布旁边,挂着一个用链子挂着的放大镜。约翰不确定地看着这个奇怪的组合——他是不是应该抬头看它?这幅画看起来是空白的——但如果是的话,放大镜为什么在那里?他鼓起勇气,爬上摇摇晃晃的梯子,在最上面的台阶上摇摇晃晃地保持平衡,拿起放大镜,伸长脖子抬头看着白色的画布。起初,他以为它是空白的,某种关于虚无的艺术表达。但后来他看到了:一个很小的单词,不戴眼镜就无法看清,而这个单词却永远改变了他的生活。

In late 1966, musician John Lennon was invited to attend an art exhibition called “Unfinished Paintings and Objects” at the Indica Gallery in London. He had no special interest in avant-garde art and had never heard of the artist, a woman named Yoko Ono, but when he arrived, one particular piece caught his attention: a tall stepladder in the center of the room. Mounted above it, on the ceiling, was a white canvas that appeared to be blank. Above the ladder, beside the ceiling-mounted canvas, hung a magnifying glass on a chain. John eyed this weird assemblage uncertainly—was he just supposed to look up at it? The painting looked blank—but if it was, why was the magnifier up there? He bolstered his courage, climbed the wobbly ladder, and, precariously balancing on the top step, picked up the magnifier and craned his neck to look up at the white canvas. At first, he thought it was blank, some kind of artistic statement about nothingness. But then he saw it: one tiny word, impossible to read without the glass, which would change his life forever.

答案是“是”。

The word was “yes.”

自由的感觉

The Feeling of Freedom

在之前的章节中,我们谈到了故事和游戏玩法之间的冲突。从本质上讲,这是一场关于自由的冲突。游戏和互动体验的奇妙之处在于玩家感受到的自由——这种自由让玩家拥有了绝佳的控制感,让他们可以轻松地将自己的想象力投射到你创造的世界中。自由感在游戏中如此重要,值得用新的视角来看待它。

In previous chapters, we touched on the conflict between story and gameplay. At its heart, this is a conflict about freedom. The wonderful thing about games and interactive experiences is the freedom that the player feels—this freedom gives the player the wonderful feeling of control and makes it easy for them to project their imaginations into the world you have created. The feeling of freedom is so important in a game that it merits a new lens.

尽管这让我们很难控制玩家的兴趣曲线,但当我们给玩家带来美妙的互动和控制感时,我们必须给予他们自由,对吗?

And even though it makes it very difficult for us to control the interest curve for the player, when we give them those wonderful feelings of interactivity and control, we have to give them freedom, right?

错误的。

Wrong.

我们不必总是给予玩家真正的自由——我们只需给予玩家自由的感觉。因为,正如我们所讨论的,所有真实的东西都是你感受到的——如果一个聪明的设计师可以让玩家感受到自由,而实际上玩家的选择很少,甚至根本没有选择,那么我们突然就拥有了两全其美的东西,玩家拥有美妙的自由感,设计师成功地以经济的方式创造了一种具有理想兴趣曲线和理想事件集的体验。

We don’t always have to give the player true freedom—we only have to give the player the feeling of freedom. For, as we’ve discussed, all that’s real is what you feel—if a clever designer can make a player feel free, when really the player has very few choices, or even no choice at all, then suddenly we have the best of both worlds, the player has the wonderful feeling of freedom, and the designer has managed to economically create an experience with an ideal interest curve and an ideal set of events.

但这样的事情怎么可能实现呢?当没有自由或自由非常有限时,如何创造自由的感觉?毕竟,设计师无法控制玩家进入游戏后会做什么,对吧?

But how is such a thing possible? How can one create the feeling of freedom, when no freedom or very limited freedom exists? After all, a designer has no control over what a player does when they enter a game, right?

不对。设计师确实无法直接控制玩家的行为,但可以通过各种微妙的方式间接控制玩家的行为。这种间接控制可能是我们遇到的最微妙、最精妙、最巧妙、最重要的技术。

No, not right. It is true that the designer does not have direct control over what a player does, but through various subtle means, they can exert indirect control over the actions of a player. And this indirect control is possibly the most subtle, delicate, artful, and important technique of any we will encounter.

为了理解我所说的内容,让我们来看看一些间接控制的方法。间接控制的方法有很多,各式各样,而且很微妙,但一般来说,这六种方法最有效。

To understand what I’m talking about, let’s look at some of the methods of indirect control. There are many of them, varied and subtle, but generally these six do most of the work.

间接控制方法1:约束

Indirect Control Method #1: Constraints

考虑一下这两个请求之间的区别:

Consider the difference between these two requests:

  • 要求 1:选择颜色:___________

  • Request 1: Pick a color: ___________

  • 要求 2:选择一种颜色:a. 红色 b. 蓝色 c. 绿色

  • Request 2: Pick a color: a. red b. blue c. green

这两种方式都给予答题者自由选择的权利,而且它们要求的也差不多。但两者的区别是巨大的,因为对于要求 1,答题者可以从数百万个不同的答案中选择一个——“消防车红”、“菜花蓝”、“淡灰褐色”、“天蓝粉色”、“不,你选一个颜色”,或者实际上任何颜色都可以。

Both of them give the answerer freedom of choice, and they are both asking for about the same thing. But the difference is tremendous because for Request 1, the answerer could have chosen one of millions of different answers—“fire engine red,” “cauliflower blue,” “mauvish taupe,” “sky blue pink,” “no, you pick a color,” or just about anything, really.

但是对于请求 2,回答者只有三个选择。他们仍然有自由,仍然可以选择,但是我们设法将选择的数量从数百万减少到三个!而那些本来要选择红色、蓝色或绿色的回答者甚至不会注意到其中的区别。还有一些人会更喜欢请求 2 而不是请求 1,因为太多的自由可能是一件令人畏惧的事情——它会迫使你的想象力努力工作。在我游乐园的日子里,我有时会在糖果店工作,面对着一大堆六十种口味的老式棒棒糖。每天有一百次,人们会进来问“你们那边有什么口味?”起初,我想我会很自作聪明,把所有六十种口味都背出来——当我这样做的时候,顾客的眼睛会因为恐惧而睁大,而就在第三十二种口味的时候,他们会说:“停!停!够了!”他们完全被这么多的选择弄得不知所措。过了一会儿,我想到了一种新方法。当他们问到口味时,我会说“我们有你能想象到的所有口味。来吧,说出你喜欢的口味——我相信我们有。”

But for Request 2, the answerer only has three choices. They still have freedom, they still get to choose, but we have managed to cut the number of choices from millions to three! And the answerers who were going to pick red, blue, or green anyway won’t even notice the difference. And still others will prefer Request 2 over Request 1, because too much freedom can be a daunting thing—it forces your imagination to work hard. In my amusement park days, I sometimes worked in the candy store, in front of a big display of sixty flavors of old-fashioned stick candy. A hundred times a day, people would come in and ask “What flavors do you have back there?” At first, I thought I would be a smart aleck and recite all sixty flavors—as I did this, the customer’s eyes would get wide with fear, and right around the thirty-second flavor, they would say, “Stop! Stop! That’s enough!” They were completely overwhelmed by so many choices. After a while, I thought of a new approach. When they asked about the flavors, I would say “We have every flavor you can imagine. Go on, name the flavors you would like—I’m sure we have them.”

一开始,他们会对这种强大的自由感到印象深刻。但后来他们会皱起眉头,认真思考,然后说:“呃……樱桃?不,等等……我不想要那个……嗯……薄荷?不……哦,算了吧,”然后他们会沮丧地走开。最后,我想出了一个卖出很多糖果的策略如果有人问起口味,我会说:“我们几乎有你能想象到的所有口味,但最受欢迎的口味是樱桃、蓝莓、柠檬、根汁啤酒、冬青和甘草。”他们很高兴能有这种自由的感觉,但也很高兴有少数有吸引力的选择;事实上,大多数顾客会从“最受欢迎的六种”中选择,这是我制定的清单,我会经常更改清单,以确保其他口味不会在货架上放得太久。这是一个间接控制的例子——通过限制他们的选择,我让他们更有可能做出选择。但不是任何选择——是我引导他们做出的选择。尽管我限制他们选择的手段很狡猾,但他们仍然保持着自由的感觉,甚至可能感到自由感增强,因为他们的选择比我完全不引导他们时更清晰。

At first, they would be impressed with this powerful freedom. But then they would furrow up their brows, think hard, and say, “Uh… cherry? No, wait… I don’t want that… Hmm…. peppermint? No… Oh, just forget it,” and they would walk away in frustration. Finally, I figured out a strategy that sold a lot of candy sticks. When someone would ask about the flavors, I would say “We have just about every flavor you can imagine, but our most popular flavors are cherry, blueberry, lemon, root beer, wintergreen, and licorice.” They were delighted at having the feeling of freedom but also glad to have a small number of attractive choices; in fact, most customers would choose from the “popular six,” a list I made up and a list I would change frequently to help ensure the other flavors didn’t get too old on the shelf. This is an example of indirect control in action—by constraining their choices, I made it more likely they would make a choice. But not just any choice—the choices I guided them toward. And despite my tricky methods of constraining their choices, they retained a feeling of freedom and perhaps felt an enhanced feeling of freedom, since their choices were clearer than when I didn’t guide them at all.

这种通过约束进行间接控制的方法在游戏中一直被使用。如果游戏将玩家放在一个有两扇门的空房间里,玩家几乎肯定会穿过其中一扇门。我们不一定知道是哪一扇门,但他们肯定会穿过其中一扇门,因为门传达着“打开我”的信息,而玩家天生好奇。毕竟,没有其他地方可去。如果你问玩家是否有选择,他们会说有,因为即使两个选项也是一种选择。相比之下,将玩家放在空旷的田野、城市街道或购物中心中。在那些情况下,他们去哪里以及做什么更加开放且难以预测——除非你使用其他间接控制方法。

This method of indirect control by constraint is used in games all the time. If a game puts a player in an empty room with two doors, the player will almost certainly go through one of them. Which one, we don’t necessarily know, but they will surely go through one, since a door is a message that says “open me” and players are naturally curious. After all, there is nowhere else to go. If you ask the player if they had choices, they would say they did, for even two options is a choice. Compare this to putting a player in an open field, out on a city street, or in a shopping mall. In those cases, where they go and what they do is far more open ended and difficult to predict—unless you use other methods of indirect control.

间接控制方法2:目标

Indirect Control Method #2: Goals

游戏设计中最常见、最直接的间接控制方式是通过目标。如果玩家有两扇门可以穿过,我真的不知道他们会进入哪一扇门。但如果我给他们一个目标“去找到所有的香蕉”,而其中一扇门后面显然有香蕉,我就能很好地猜出他们会去哪里。

The most common and straightforward use of indirect control in game design is through goals. If a player has two doors they can go through, I don’t really know which one they are going to enter. But if I give them a goal of “go find all the bananas,” and one of the doors clearly has bananas behind it, I can make a pretty good guess about where they are going to go.

之前,我们谈到了设定好目标的重要性,这能让玩家有理由关注你的游戏。但是,一旦设定了明确且可实现的目标,你就可以利用这一事实,围绕目标塑造你的世界,因为你的玩家只会去他们认为有助于实现目标的地方和做他们认为有助于实现目标的事情。如果你的赛车游戏是关于穿越城市到达终点线,你不必构建完整的街道地图,因为如果你清楚地标记了最快的路线,人们大多会坚持这条路线。你可以添加少量小巷(特别是如果有些是捷径!)来给人一种自由的感觉,但你选择的目标会间接控制玩家避免探索每条小巷。创建玩家永远不会看到的内容并不能给他们更多的自由——它只是浪费了本可以用来改善玩家将看到的地方的开发资源。

Earlier, we talked about the importance of establishing good goals to give players a reason to care about your game. Once clear and achievable goals have been established, though, you can take advantage of that fact by sculpting your world around the goals, since your players will only go places and do things that they think will help fulfill the goals. If your driving game is about racing through a city to get to a finish line, you don’t have to build a complete street map, because if you clearly mark the fastest route, people will mostly stick to that. You might add a small number of side streets (especially if some are shortcuts!) to give a feeling of freedom, but the goal you have selected will indirectly control players to avoid exploring every little side street. Creating content that players will never see does not give them more freedom—it just wastes development resources that could be used to improve the places that the players will see.

需要注意的是玩家信心和目标之间的重要相互作用。如果玩家对自己的目标以及追求目标的能力非常有信心,间接控制的强大效果将会成倍增加,因为玩家会自信地遵循自己的直觉。然而,如果玩家对自己的目标感到困惑,或者怀疑自己在这个世界中正确互动的能力,间接控制的效果就会大大减弱,因为玩家会重新思考自己该做什么以及如何去做的直觉。

Something important to note is the important interaction between player confidence and goals. If players feel very confident about their goals, and their ability to pursue them, the powerful effects of indirect control will be multiplied, as the players will confidently follow their own instincts. However, if players are confused about their goals, or doubtful of their ability to interact properly in this world, the effects of indirect control will be greatly diminished, as the players second guess their own instincts about what to do and how to do it.

阿姆斯特丹史基浦机场男厕所就是一个有趣的间接控制在现实生活中的应用案例。这些厕所小便池的使用者很快注意到里面有一只苍蝇。这不是一只真正的苍蝇,而是瓷器表面的蚀刻图案。为什么?设计师试图解决“射击不准”的问题,因为这样会需要更多的清洁服务。蚀刻图案中的苍蝇创造了一个隐含的目标——击中苍蝇。通过将苍蝇放置在小便池的中央(并稍微向一侧倾斜以减小入射角),厕所会变得更干净。“玩家”的自由丝毫没有受到削弱,而是受到间接控制,朝着设计师认为最佳的行为方向发展。

One fascinating real-world example of indirect control in action can be seen in the men’s restrooms of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Users of the urinals in these restrooms quickly notice that they contain a fly. This is not an actual fly; rather, it is just an etching in the surface of the porcelain. Why? The designers were trying to solve the problem of “sloppy marksmanship,” which results in the need for more janitorial service. The etched fly creates an implicit goal—hit the fly. By placing the fly in the center of the urinal (and slightly to one side to soften the angle of incidence), the bathrooms stay cleaner. The “players” have not had their freedom diminished in the least, but are indirectly controlled toward the behavior that the designers find optimal.

间接控制方法3:界面

Indirect Control Method #3: Interface

我们已经讨论了反馈、透明度、趣味性以及良好界面的重要方面。但是,还有一点需要考虑:间接控制。由于玩家希望界面透明,所以他们实际上并不会考虑界面,如果他们能做到的话。换句话说,他们根据界面设定了对游戏中可以做什么和不能做什么的期望。如果您的“摇滚明星”游戏以塑料吉他作为物理界面,您的玩家可能会期望弹吉他,并且可能不会想到他们可能想要做其他事情。如果您给他们一个游戏手柄,他们可能会想知道他们是否可以演奏不同的乐器和跳台,或者摇滚明星可能会做的任何其他事情。但是那把塑料吉他偷走了这些选择——默默地将玩家限制在单一活动中。当我们用木制船舵和三十磅重的旋转铝炮建造我们的虚拟海盗景点时,没有客人问他们是否可以在游戏中进行剑斗——他们从未想过这个选项。

We’ve already talked about feedback, transparency, juiciness, and important aspects of a good interface. But there is something else to consider about your interface: indirect control. Because players want interfaces to be transparent, they don’t really think about the interface, if they can help it. In other words, they set up their expectations about what they can and cannot do in a game based on the interface. If your “rock star” game has a plastic guitar as the physical interface, your players are probably going to expect to play the guitar, and it probably will not occur to them that they might want to do something else. If you give them a gamepad instead, they might wonder if they can play different instruments and do stage dives, or any number of other things a rock star might do. But that plastic guitar secretly steals away those options—silently limiting the players to a single activity. When we built our virtual Pirates attraction with a wooden ship’s wheel and thirty-pound spun-aluminum cannons, no guest ever asked whether they could sword fight as part of the game—that option never entered their minds.

而且,并非只有物理界面才具有这种能力,虚拟界面也拥有这种能力。即使是你控制的虚拟形象,也就是虚拟界面的一部分,也会对玩家施加间接控制。如果玩家控制的是人类冒险者,他们会尝试做某些事情。如果他们控制的是蜻蜓、大象或谢尔曼坦克,他们会尝试做非常不同的事情。虚拟形象的选择在一定程度上决定了玩家会与谁产生联系,但也隐性地限制了玩家的选择。

And it isn’t just the physical interface that has this power—the virtual interface has it, too. Even the avatar you control, which is part of the virtual interface, exerts indirect control over the player. If the player controls a human adventurer, they will try to do certain things. If they control a dragonfly, an elephant, or a Sherman tank, they will try to do very different things. The choice of avatar is partly about who a player will relate to, but it is also about implicitly limiting the player’s options.

间接控制方法#4:视觉设计

Indirect Control Method #4: Visual Design

我们被误导去相信谎言

当我们用眼睛看,而不是通过眼睛看的时候。

—威廉·布莱克

We are led to believe a lie

when we see with, not through, the eye.

—William Blake

任何从事视觉艺术领域工作的人都知道,布局会影响客人的视线。这在互动体验中非常重要,因为客人往往会关注那些吸引他们注意力的东西。因此,如果你能控制人们的视线,你就能控制他们去往何处。图 18.3显示了一个简单的示例。

Anyone who works in an area of the visual arts knows that layout affects where the guest will look. This becomes very important in an interactive experience, since guests tend to go to what draws their attention. Therefore, if you can control where someone is going to look, you can control where they are going to go. Figure 18.3 shows a simple example.

看着这张图片,你的眼睛很难不被引向页面的中心。在互动体验中,访客看到这个场景时,很可能会先检查中心三角形,然后再考虑框架边缘可能是什么。这与图 18.4形成了鲜明的对比。

It is difficult, looking at this picture, for your eyes not to be led to the center of the page. A guest looking at this scene in an interactive experience would be very likely to examine the central triangle before considering what might be at the edges of the frame. This is in sharp contrast to Figure 18.4.

在这里,游客的眼睛被迫探索画面的边缘和更远处。如果这个场景是互动体验的一部分,游客很可能会试图更多地了解边缘上的物体,而不是场景中间的圆圈。如果可以的话,他们很可能会尝试越过屏幕的边界。

Here, the guest’s eyes are compelled to explore the edges of the frame and beyond. If this scene were part of an interactive experience, it would be a good bet that the guest would be trying to find out more about the objects on the edges, rather than the circle in the middle of the scene. Most likely, they would try to push past the borders of the screen, if they could.

这些例子很抽象,但现实世界中有很多例子可以说明同样的道理。例如,被子的设计者会花很多心思来吸引眼球。人们常说,好的被子设计会让眼睛不停地在被子周围移动,而不会停留在单一的图像上。

These examples are abstract, but there are plenty of real-world examples that illustrate the same thing. The designers of quilts, for example, think a great deal about how to draw the eye. It is often said that a good quilt design makes the eye flit continuously around the quilt, never letting it come to rest on a single image.



18.3

FIGURE

18.3



18.4

FIGURE

18.4

布景设计师、插画师、建筑师和电影摄影师使用这些原则来引导游客的视线并间接控制他们的注意力。迪士尼乐园中心的城堡就是一个很好的例子。沃尔特·迪士尼知道游客进入公园后在入口处乱逛,不知道去哪里,这有一定的风险。城堡的位置使得游客一进入公园,目光就会立即被吸引到它上面(类似于图 18.3),他们的脚步也会迅速跟上。很快,游客就到了迪士尼乐园的中心,几个视觉地标向不同的方向引导着他们(类似于图 18.4)。沃尔特间接地控制游客做他想让他们做的事情:快速移动到迪士尼乐园的中心,然后随机地分散到公园的其他地方。当然,游客很少意识到这种操纵。毕竟,没有人告诉他们去哪里。游客们所知道的是,他们没有多想,完全自由地来到了一个有趣的地方,享受了一次有趣的娱乐体验。

Set designers, illustrators, architects, and cinematographers use these principles to guide the eye of their guests and indirectly control their focus. One excellent example is the castle at the center of Disneyland. Walt Disney knew that there was some risk of guests entering the park and milling about at the entrance, unsure of where to go. The castle is placed such that the guests’ eyes are immediately drawn to it upon entering the park (similar to Figure 18.3), and their feet are quick to follow. Soon the guests are at the Disneyland hub, with several visual landmarks beckoning them in different directions (similar to Figure 18.4). Indirectly, Walt was able to control guests to do just what he wanted them to do: Move quickly to the center of Disneyland, and then branch out randomly to other parts of the park. Of course, the guests are seldom aware of this manipulation. After all, no one told them where to go. All the guests know is that without much thinking, and with total freedom, they ended up somewhere interesting and had a fun entertainment experience.

沃尔特甚至为这种操控行为取了个名字。他称之为视觉“weenie”,指的是电影片场有时控制狗的方式:训练员举着热狗或肉块,四处移动以控制狗的视线,因为没有什么比食物更能吸引狗的注意力了。

Walt even had a name for this kind of manipulation. He called it a visual “weenie,” a reference to the way dogs are sometimes controlled on a movie set: A trainer holds a hot dog or piece of meat in the air, and moves it around to control where the dog will look, since nothing draws the attention of a dog better than food.

好的关卡设计的关键之一是让玩家的眼睛毫不费力地带领他们通过关卡。这让玩家感到自己掌控一切,沉浸在这个世界中。了解什么能吸引玩家的眼球可以让你获得巨大的玩家想要做出的选择。当迪士尼 VR 工作室制作《阿拉丁魔毯之旅:VR 冒险》 Mark 2 版本时,我们面临一个重大难题。一个非常重要的场景是宫殿的王座室,如下所示:

One of the keys to good level design is that the player’s eyes pull them through the level, effortlessly. It makes the player feel in control and immersed in the world. Understanding what pulls the eye of the player can give you tremendous power over the choices players want to make. When the Disney VR Studio worked on the Mark 2 version of Aladdin’s Magic Carpet Ride: VR Adventure, we faced a significant conundrum. One very important scene was the palace throne room, shown here:



18.5

FIGURE

18.5

(由迪士尼企业公司提供,已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)

动画导演希望玩家飞进这个房间,然后飞到大象雕像底座上的小王座上,坐下来听苏丹的讯息,然后再继续游戏。我们原本希望,穿着白色衣服在王座上跳上跳下的小苏丹足以吸引人们过来听他讲话——但这并没有发生。这些玩家是在飞毯上!他们想飞来飞去,飞到天花板、绕着柱子,飞到任何他们能飞的地方。他们的隐含目标是飞行和玩乐——拜访苏丹不符合他们的计划。别无选择,我们准备实施一个系统,夺走玩家的控制权,把他们拖过房间到苏丹那里,并在他讲话时把他们粘在原地。没有人喜欢这个想法,因为我们都知道这意味着剥夺玩家宝贵的自由感。

The animation director wanted players to fly into this room, then fly up to that little throne at the base of the elephant statue, and sit for a moment and listen to a message from the Sultan before they continued their gameplay. We had hoped that the little Sultan, dressed in white hopping up and down on that throne, would be enough to draw people over to listen to him—but that didn’t happen. These players were on flying carpets! They wanted to fly all around, up to the ceiling, around the pillars, anywhere they could. Their implicit goal was to fly and have fun—visiting the Sultan didn’t fit in with that plan. Seeing no other choice, we were all set to implement a system that seized control from the players, dragging them across the room to the Sultan and gluing them to the spot while he talked. No one liked this idea, since we all knew it meant robbing the players of their precious feeling of freedom.

但后来艺术总监有了一个想法。

But then the art director had an idea.

他在地板上画了一条红线,如下所示:

He painted a single red line on the floor, like this:

他的想法是,也许客人会遵守红线。我们都有些怀疑,但对我们来说,制作原型是一件很容易的事情。令我们震惊的是令人惊讶的是,客人们确实做到了!进入房间后,他们并没有像我们之前看到的那样四处乱飞,而是沿着红线,就像某种牵引光束一样,一直走到苏丹的王座前。当他开始说话时(那时客人们已经离他很近了),他们等着听他说些什么!虽然不是每次都有效,但 90% 以上的时间都有效,这对于这次体验来说已经足够了。最令人吃惊的部分是在之后的采访中——当问玩家为什么他们沿着王座室的红线走时,他们会说“什么红线?”它根本没有出现在他们的意识记忆中。

His thinking was that maybe guests would follow the red line. We were all somewhat skeptical, but it was an easy thing for us to prototype. And to our stunned amazement, guests did exactly that! Upon entering the room, instead of flying every which way like we had seen before, they followed the red line like it was some kind of tractor beam, right up to the Sultan’s throne. And when he started talking (by that time guests were right up close to him), they waited to hear what he had to say! It didn’t work every single time, but it did work over 90% of the time, which was perfectly adequate for this experience. The most startling part was in the interviews afterwards—upon asking players why they followed the red line in the throne room, they would say “What red line?” It didn’t register in their conscious memory at all.



18.6

FIGURE

18.6

(由迪士尼企业公司提供,已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)

一开始我不明白:一条简单的红线怎么能抹去玩家在房间里飞来飞去的想法呢?但后来我意识到——是看到柱子和吊灯才让他们产生了飞来飞去的想法。红线在场景中占据了视觉主导地位,阻止了他们注意到其他东西,所以他们甚至没有想到做这些其他事情。

At first this didn’t make sense to me: How could a simple red line wipe the idea of flying around the room out of the minds of the players? But then I realized—it was seeing the columns and the chandeliers that put the idea of flying around into their minds. The red line was so visually dominant in the scene that it stopped them from noticing these other things, and so the idea to do these other things didn’t even occur to them.

奇怪的是,我们在 Mark 3 版游戏中遇到了这个问题的新版本。在这个版本中,有四名玩家同时进行游戏,我们不希望他们全都去苏丹那里。我们希望他们分开去不同的地方——我们希望一些玩家去拜访苏丹,其他玩家飞过房间左右两侧的门。但是那条暴虐的红线让所有四名玩家都飞到苏丹那里。我们再次开始讨论如何强迫玩家分开——但后来我们又有了不同的想法——我们能改变红线来实现这一点吗?我们尝试了以下方法:

Curiously, we faced a new version of this problem in the Mark 3 version of the game. In this version, which was for four simultaneous players, we didn’t want them all to go to the Sultan. We wanted them to split up and go to different places—we wanted some players to visit the Sultan and others to fly through doors on the left and right sides of the room. But the tyrannical red line was making all four players fly up to the Sultan. Again we started discussing how we probably had to force the players to split up—but then we had a different thought—could we change the red line to make that happen? We tried this:



18.7

FIGURE

18.7

(由迪士尼企业公司提供,已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)

效果非常好。大多数情况下,两名玩家会访问王座,一名玩家会沿着队伍向左分支,前往左边的门,另一名玩家会沿着队伍向右分支,前往右边的门。

And it worked beautifully. In most cases, two players would visit the throne, one player would branch left following the line to the left door, and one player would branch right, following the line to the right door.

间接控制方法#5:角色

Indirect Control Method #5: Characters

间接控制玩家的一个非常直接的方法是通过游戏中的计算机控制角色。如果你能利用讲故事的能力让玩家真正关心角色——也就是说,愿意服从他们、保护他们、帮助他们或摧毁他们——你突然拥有了一个极好的工具来控制玩家会做什么和不会做什么。

One very straightforward method of indirectly controlling the player is through computer-controlled characters in the game. If you can use your storytelling ability to make the player actually care about the characters—that is, willingly wanting to obey them, protect them, help them, or destroy them—you suddenly have an excellent tool to control what the player will and will not try to do.

这在早期的互动电影中发挥了巨大作用:威廉·卡斯尔 (William Castle) 于 1961 年执导的《Sardonicus 先生》采用了一种不同寻常的噱头。旁白解释说,电影的结局取决于观众——坏人应该受到惩罚,还是得到宽恕?每位观众都会拿到一张“竖起大拇指/竖起大拇指”卡片,以便放映员可以装入相应的胶片。卡斯尔非常有信心观众会选择“惩罚”胶片。事实上,他是如此自信,以至于他从来没有费心拍摄“宽恕”胶片,观众也从未注意到。

This was used to great effect in an early interactive movie: Mr. Sardonicus, directed by William Castle in 1961, featured an unusual gimmick. The narrator explains that how the film ends is up to the audience—should the villain suffer punishment, or be forgiven? Each audience member was given a “thumbs-up/thumbs-down” card to hold up, so the projectionist could load the appropriate film reel. Castle had significant confidence that audiences would choose the “punishment” reel. He was so confident, in fact, that he never bothered to film the “forgiveness” reel, and no audience ever noticed.

在游戏《动物之森》中,一个名为“快乐房间学院”(HRA)的神秘委员会会定期评估你对房屋内部装饰的了解程度,并根据你的表现奖励积分。玩家非常努力地获得这些积分——部分是因为这是游戏的目标,但我认为部分是因为想到有人看着你家的内部并厌恶地摇头,即使他们只是想象出来的,也会让人感到尴尬。

In the game Animal Crossing, a mysterious council called the Happy Room Academy (HRA) periodically evaluates how well you have decorated the interior of your house and awards you points based on how well you have done. Players work very hard to get these points—partly because it is a goal of the game, but I think also partly because it feels embarrassing to think that someone is looking at the inside of your house and shaking their head in disgust, even if they are only imaginary.

在游戏《古堡迷踪》中,你的目标是保护一位与你同行的公主。设计师在游戏中设计了一个非常巧妙的计时机制——如果你静止不动太久,恶灵就会出现,抓住公主,并试图将她拖进地上的一个洞里。尽管他们只有在成功将她带走时才会伤害她,而且他们实际上需要一些时间才能将她拖进洞里,但我发现自己在他们出现的那一刻就立即采取行动,因为一想到他们触摸她,我就觉得自己让她失望了。

In the game Ico, your goal is to protect a princess who travels with you. The designers have a very clever timer mechanism in the game—evil spirits appear if you stay still too long, grab the princess, and try to drag her into a hole in the ground. Even though they can’t hurt her unless they succeed in carrying her away, and it takes some time for them to actually pull her into the hole, I found myself snapping into action the moment they appeared, for the very idea of them touching her made me feel like I was letting her down.

角色可以很好地操纵玩家试图做出的选择或他们对这些选择的感受。但首先,你必须让玩家关心这些虚构角色的感受,因为一旦你做到了这一点,就很容易激发玩家的行动,因为人类天性的一个奇妙方面就是渴望帮助我们同情的人。这个观点非常有用,我们应该把它添加到我们的工具箱中。

Characters can be a great way to manipulate the choices the player is trying to make or how they feel about those choices. But first, you have to make the player care about how those imaginary characters feel, for once you have done that, it is easy to inspire action in the player, for one marvelous aspect of human nature is a deep desire to help those we empathize with. It is a point of view so useful we should add it to our toolbox.

间接控制方法6:音乐

Indirect Control Method #6: Music

大多数设计师在考虑为游戏添加音乐时,通常会考虑想要营造的情绪和游戏氛围。但音乐也会对玩家的行为产生重大影响。

When most designers think of adding music to a game, they usually think of the mood they want to create and the atmosphere of the game. But music can also have a significant effect on what players do.

餐馆一直都在使用这种方法。快节奏的音乐让人们吃得更快,所以在午餐高峰期,许多餐馆都会播放高能量的舞曲,因为吃得更快意味着更多的利润。当然,在下午三点等淡季,他们会采取相反的做法。空荡荡的餐馆往往是糟糕的标志,所以为了让食客流连忘返,他们会播放慢节奏的音乐,放慢进食速度,让顾客考虑再点一杯咖啡或一份甜点。当然,顾客们并没有意识到这种情况正在发生——他们认为他们可以完全自由地控制自己的行为。

Restaurants use this method all the time. Fast music makes people eat faster, so during a lunch rush, many restaurants play high-energy dance music, because faster eating means more profits. And of course, during a slow period, like three in the afternoon, they do the opposite. An empty restaurant often is a sign of a bad restaurant, so to make diners linger, they play slow music, which slows down the eating and makes customers consider ordering an extra cup of coffee or a dessert. Of course, the patrons don’t realize this is happening—they think they have total freedom over their actions.

如果这种方法对餐厅经理有用,那么对你来说也同样有用。想想你应该播放什么样的音乐来让玩家:

If it works for restaurant managers, it can work for you. Think about what kind of music you should play to make players:

  • 环顾四周寻找隐藏的东西。

  • Look around for something hidden.

  • 毫不放慢速度地摧毁一切可能的东西。

  • Destroy everything possible without slowing down.

  • 意识到他们走错了方向。

  • Realize they are heading the wrong way.

  • 缓慢而小心地移动。

  • Move slowly and carefully.

  • 担心意外伤害无辜的旁观者。

  • Worry about accidentally hurting innocent bystanders.

  • 尽可能走得更远、更快,不要回头。

  • Go as far and as fast as possible without looking back.

音乐是灵魂的语言,因此,它可以在深层次上与玩家对话——这种深层次可以改变他们的情绪、欲望和行为——而他们甚至没有意识到这一点。

Music is the language of the soul, and as such, it speaks to players on a deep level—a level so deep that it can change their moods, desires, and actions—and they don’t even realize it is happening.

这六种间接控制方法可以非常有效地平衡自由度和良好的故事叙述。不过,你的设计可能会以你从未想过的方式对玩家施加控制,这一点值得注意。20 世纪 90 年代,我带一个朋友去迪士尼世界体验了一次可怕的外星人遭遇(后来,它变得不那么可怕,更适合家庭)。它由一个室内圆形剧场组成,里面有奇怪的椅子,可以营造出一种幻觉,仿佛一个凶猛的外星怪物在黑暗的剧院里游荡,与你擦肩而过,紧盯着你。它是如此独特和令人兴奋,我相信我的朋友会喜欢它,但当它结束时,他似乎不知所措。我问他怎么想,他说:“还行。但当我看到它呈圆形布置,他们把我们绑在椅子上时,我确信剧院会旋转。但我们只是坐在那里。我的意思是,还行,只是没有达到我的预期。”

These six methods of indirect control can be very powerful ways to balance freedom and good storytelling. That it is possible your design is exerting control on players in ways you never intended is a note of caution, though. I took a friend to Walt Disney World’s scary Alien Encounter experience back in the 1990s (it has since been made less frightening and more family friendly). It consisted of indoor circular amphitheater with strange chairs that could create the illusion that a vicious alien monster was loose in the dark theater, brushing against you and breathing down your neck. It was so unique and exciting, I felt sure my friend would enjoy it, but when it was over, he seemed nonplussed. I asked what he thought, and he said, “It was okay. But when I saw how it was laid out in a circle, and they strapped us into the chairs, I was sure the theater would spin. But we just sat there. I mean, it was okay, just not what I expected.”

为了确保您的体验具有正确的间接控制,请使用此镜头。

To make sure your experience has the right kind of indirect control, use this lens.

共谋

Collusion

在设计《加勒比海盗:海盗金币之战》时,我们面临着巨大的挑战。我们必须创造一种非常强大的互动体验,而且这种体验只能持续五分钟。兴趣曲线必须非常出色,因为一个四口之家可能要花 20 美元才能玩一次这个游戏。但与此同时,我们知道这不能只是一种线性体验,因为当海盗的本质就是一种极大的自由感。根据我们以前的经验,我们知道这是一个实现间接控制的好机会。

While designing Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold, we faced a significant challenge. We had to create a very powerful interactive experience that would only last five minutes. The interest curve had to be excellent, since a family of four could be paying as much as $20 just to play this game one time. But at the same time, we knew this couldn’t just be a linear experience, because the very essence of being a pirate involved a feeling of tremendous freedom. Based on our previous experiences, we knew that this was a great opportunity for some indirect control.

我们早期的游戏原型明确了一点:如果我们只是让玩家在海上与敌人战斗,他们会在大约两分二十秒内玩得非常开心。然后他们的热情就会消退,他们有时会问:“那么……这就是我们所做的一切吗?”显然,这是一个不可接受的兴趣曲线。玩家想要更多的积累。我们认为实现这一点的方法是增加一些有趣的场景。我们认为,将这些场景放在玩家可以接近的岛屿附近,将是一个很好的方式来引导他们去发生有趣的事情的地方——有点像迪士尼乐园里的城堡引导人们。所以我们绘制了一张初始地图:

Our early prototypes of the game made one thing clear: If we just set people out on the ocean to battle enemies, they had great fun for about two minutes and twenty seconds. Then their zeal would wane, and they would sometimes ask, “So… is this all we do?” Clearly, this was an unacceptable interest curve. Players wanted more buildup. We thought a way to achieve this would be with some more interesting scenarios. We thought that by putting these scenarios near islands that the players could approach, it would be a great way to guide them to where interesting things were happening—kind of like the castle guides people in Disneyland. So, we drew up an initial map:



18.8

FIGURE

18.8

(由迪士尼企业公司提供,已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)

玩家会从中心开始,我们预计他们会在那里与一些敌人战斗,然后他们会航行到其中一个岛屿,每个岛屿都设计得很有趣,从远处就能看到。他们去哪个岛屿由他们自己决定——他们可以自由选择,因为每个岛屿都有不同类型的遭遇。在一个岛上,邪恶的海盗正在围攻一座燃烧的城镇。在另一个岛上,火山边正在进行一场令人惊讶的采矿作业。在第三个岛上,皇家海军正在运送大量黄金,并用发射火球的弹射器守卫他们的要塞。我们确信这些大岛会吸引很多玩家的兴趣。

Players would start in the center, where we expected they would fight some enemies, and then they would hopefully sail for one of the islands, each designed to be interesting and visible from a distance. Which island they went to was up to them—they had freedom to choose, for each island had different types of encounters. At one, evil pirates were besieging a burning town. At another, a surprising mining operation was taking place on the side of a volcano. At a third, the royal navy was transporting huge quantities of gold and guarding their stronghold with catapults that launched fireballs. We were sure that these big islands would draw a lot of player interest.

天哪,我们错了。看一下图 18.9,你就会发现问题所在。

Boy, were we wrong. Taking a look at Figure 18.9, you can see the problem.

玩家被告知他们的目标是击沉海盗船。在这里,他们被巨大的、带有亮白色船帆的海盗船包围着。看看远处那座可怜的火山。它几乎不引人注意,与玩家目标无关!

The players have been told that their goal is to sink the pirate ships. Here they are surrounded by large, threatening pirate ships with bright white sails. Look at that poor volcano in the distance. It is hardly noticeable and has nothing to do with the player goals!

我们马上就发现这行不通。我们开始考虑将海盗船设置在一条固定的路径上,引导它们到达岛屿。但后来我们有了一个有趣的想法。如果敌方海盗船没有按照自己的最佳利益行事怎么办?到目前为止,我们花了很多时间编写花哨的算法,让敌方船只以有趣和智能的策略发起攻击。我们的新想法是放弃所有这些,改变船只的逻辑。在新系统中,在游戏开始时,当玩家在公海上遇到船只时,船只会攻击玩家,但随后他们会开始逃跑。玩家的目标是摧毁敌船,他们会追击他们。然后我们试着安排时间,这样就在玩家摧毁敌船的时候,船只已经到达其中一个岛屿(随机选择)。随着船只沉没,玩家抬头会发现自己身处一个有趣的岛屿场景。他们会在那里战斗,却遭到新船只的攻击,而新船只又逃走了——逃到哪里?逃到玩家还没有去过的任何岛屿。

We saw right away that this wasn’t working. And we started considering the possibility of putting the pirate ship on a fixed path that guided them to the islands. But then we had a funny idea. What if the enemy pirate ships didn’t act in their own best interest? Up until now, we had been spending a lot of time writing fancy algorithms to make the enemy ships attack with interesting and intelligent strategies. Our new idea was to scrap all that and change the logic of the ships. With the new system, at the start of the game, when the players encounter ships on the open ocean, the ships would attack the players, but then they would start to flee. The players, fixed on their goal of destroying enemy ships, would pursue them. We then tried to time things so that right about when the players destroyed the enemy ships, the ships had arrived at one of the islands (chosen randomly). With the ships sunk, the players would look up to find themselves at an interesting island scenario. They would do battle there, only to be attacked by new ships that again fled—to where? To whatever island the players had not visited yet.



18.9

FIGURE

18.9

(由迪士尼企业公司提供,已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc. Used with permission.)

这一策略效果极佳。在完全自由的感觉下,玩家将获得非常有条理的体验:他们将从一场激动人心的战斗开始,然后是迷你场景,然后是一场新的海战,然后是另一个新的迷你场景。我们知道我们必须有一个完美的结局,但我们不确定玩家会在哪里。所以在第四分钟之后不久,完美的结局就出现了,突然出现一片浓雾,幽灵海盗发起了攻击,与玩家展开了一场史诗般的最后战斗。

This strategy worked magnificently. With a feeling of total freedom, the players would have a very structured experience: they would start with an exciting battle, followed by a mini-scenario, followed by a new naval battle, followed by another new mini-scenario. We knew we had to have a big finish, but we couldn’t be sure where the players would be. So a little bit after the fourth minute, the big finish came to them, in the form of a sudden fog and an attack by ghost pirates who engaged the players in an epic final battle.

整个事情之所以能够实现,是因为我们做了一件非常不寻常的事情——我们让游戏中的角色同时拥有两个目标。一方面,他们的目标是让玩家参与一场具有挑战性的战斗。另一方面,他们的目标是引导玩家到有趣的地方,以保持体验的最佳流畅性。我把这称为原则勾结,因为游戏角色与设计师为玩家提供最佳体验。这是一种有趣的间接控制形式,结合了使用目标、角色和视觉设计的方法,以实现统一的效果。

The whole thing was only possible because we did something very unusual—we made the characters in the game have two simultaneous goals. On one hand, their goal is to engage the players in a challenging battle. On the other hand, their goal is to lead the players to interesting places to keep the flow of the experience optimal. I call this principle collusion, since the game characters are colluding with the designer to make an experience that will be optimal for the players. It is an interesting form of indirect control that joins methods of using goals, characters, and visual design for a single unified effect.

有证据表明,这种通过合谋实现的间接控制可能成为未来互动叙事的核心。由安德鲁·斯特恩和迈克尔·马特亚斯创作的引人入胜的《Façade》体验将这一理念提升到了一个全新的高度。在《Façade》中,您扮演一位客人,参加一场晚宴,晚宴由一对夫妇格蕾丝和特里普主持。您的界面主要由打字输入组成,这为您提供了极大的自由和灵活性。在游戏过程中,您很快就会发现自己是聚会上唯一的客人,而且奇怪的是,今天是他们的周年纪念日。这种情况让人很不舒服,因为他们不断争吵,双方都试图让您站在他们一边。这是一种非常不寻常的游戏体验,其目标更像是小说或电视节目中的目标,而不是电子游戏中的目标。

There is some evidence that this kind of indirect control via collusion may be central to the future of interactive storytelling. The fascinating Façade experience, created by Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas, takes this idea to a new level. In Façade, you play the role of a guest at a dinner party, hosted by Grace and Trip, a married couple. Your interface is one that mainly consists of speaking through typed text, which offers tremendous freedom and flexibility. As you play, you quickly notice that you are the only guest at the party, and weirdly, it is their anniversary. The situation is very uncomfortable because of their constant bickering, each trying to get you to take sides in their arguments. It is a very unusual game experience with goals that are more like those in a novel or television show than in a videogame.



18.10

FIGURE

18.10

还有一些不寻常之处。这款游戏在不同的环节似乎玩起来完全不同——每次玩游戏时,你听到的对话可能只有录制下来的 10%。这不是一串珍珠结构,甚至不是分支结构。这是一个模拟,其中 Grace 和 Trip 是人工智能角色,他们有目标要实现。这是通过与传感器触发的行为相关的相当标准的 AI 模型来实现的(图 18.11)。

Something else is unusual, too. The game seems to play quite differently on different sessions—each time you play, you hear perhaps 10% of the dialog that was recorded. This is not a string of pearls structure, or even a branching structure. This is a simulation where Grace and Trip are artificially intelligent characters who have goals they are trying to achieve. This is done through fairly standard AI models of goals related to behaviors that are triggered by sensors (Figure 18.11).

然而,就像我们狡猾的海盗船一样,Grace 和 Trip 并不只是想满足自己的目标。他们也非常清楚自己是故事的一部分,因此应该努力让故事变得有趣。当他们选择说什么和做什么时,他们的决定的一部分涉及他们所说的内容是否适合故事的这一部分,设计师们为他们认为适合体验的紧张程度编制了时间线(图 18.12)。

However, like our tricky pirate ships, Grace and Trip are not just trying to satisfy their own goals. They also are very aware that they are part of a story and, as such, should be trying to make it interesting. As they make their choices about what to say and do, part of their decision concerns whether what they are saying is of the proper tension for this part of the story, and the designers encoded a timeline of what they thought was an appropriate tension over time for the experience (Figure 18.12).

这个图表看起来是不是很熟悉?通过让 Grace 和 Trip 按照这个张力图做出决定,同时试图实现他们作为故事中角色的目标,他们的行为既有意义,又能让玩家对事件顺序保持兴趣。

Does that graph look familiar? By having Grace and Trip make decisions that follow this tension graph, while simultaneously trying to fulfill the goals they have as characters in the story, their behavior makes sense while keeping the player interested in the sequence of events.



18.11

FIGURE

18.11



18.12

FIGURE

18.12

看来我们只是触及了巧妙使用勾结可能带来的体验类型的皮毛。如果你想考虑如何在你的游戏中使用它,请使用这个镜头。

It would seem that we have only scratched the surface of the type of experiences that might be possible through the clever use of collusion. If you’d like to consider how you might use it in your game, use this lens.

中国哲学家老子写道:

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote:

当最好的领导者完成工作时,人们会说“我们自己做到了!”

When the best leader’s work is done the people say ‘We did it ourselves!’

希望您会发现间接控制的微妙技巧在尝试引导玩家获得让他们感受到控制、掌握和成功的参与体验时很有用。

Hopefully, you will find the subtle techniques of indirect control useful when trying to lead your players to engaging experiences where they will feel control, mastery, and success.

但这些引人入胜的体验将在哪里发生呢?

But where is it that these engaging experiences will take place?

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 想象一下:图片是如何工作的,作者:莫莉·邦 (Molly Bang)。这本简单的指南由一位著名的儿童书籍插画家撰写,是迄今为止我发现的关于视觉间接控制的最佳指南。

  • Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. This simple guide, by a noted illustrator of children’s books, is the best guide to visual indirect control I have ever found.

第十九

CHAPTER NINETEEN

故事和游戏发生在世界

Stories and Games Take Place in Worlds



19.1

FIGURE

19.1

跨媒体世界

Transmedia Worlds

1977 年 5 月,电影《星球大战》首映。这部电影出人意料地受到年轻人和老年人的追捧,尤其是年轻人。孩子们会一遍又一遍地看这部电影。肯纳玩具公司花了近一年的时间才生产出一系列以电影人物为原型的动作人物模型,但即使在电影上映一年后,这些玩具也取得了巨大的成功,以最快的速度销售,并持续多年畅销。其他星球大战商品也生产出来了——海报、拼图、睡袋、纸盘,以及你能想到的几乎所有东西——但没有什么比动作人物模型更受欢迎。

In May of 1977, the film Star Wars premiered. It was a surprise hit with young and old alike, but especially with the young. Children were going to see it again and again. It took nearly a year for Kenner Toys to produce a line of action figures based on the movie characters, but even a year after the film’s release, the toys were a tremendous success, selling as fast as they could be produced and continuing to sell well for years. Other Star Wars merchandise was produced—posters, jigsaw puzzles, sleeping bags, paper plates, and just about everything else you can imagine—but nothing was as popular as the action figures.



19.2

FIGURE

19.2

有些人认为,出售这类商品只是一种炒作手段,最终会降低电影的档次。我的意思是,与电影中看到的相比,这些玩具看起来有点俗气。

Some people believe that selling this kind of merchandise is just a way to cash in on hype and that, ultimately, it cheapens a film. I mean, these toys look kind of cheesy compared to what you see in the movie.

那么,为什么他们能卖出这么多人偶呢?对一些人来说,它们只是很酷的装饰品——他们看着它们就能记住这部电影。但对大多数孩子来说,它们有其他意义——它们是通往《星球大战》宇宙的大门。

So, why did they sell so many action figures? For some people, they were just a cool decoration—something they could look at and remember the film. But for most children, they were something else—they were a gateway into the Star Wars universe.

如果你观察孩子们和这些玩具一起玩耍,你会发现一些非常奇怪的事情。他们很少会像成年人期望的那样表演电影中的场景。相反,他们会编造各种以这些角色为主角的故事,而这些故事与电影情节只有松散的关系,而电影情节相当复杂,孩子很难完全理解。你可能会因此得出结论:如此受欢迎的是这些角色,而不是《星球大战》的故事。但通常,你会看到孩子们给这些角色起的名字,赋予他们与电影中完全不同的关系,因为他们在世界各地的卧室和后院表演由这些角色主演的戏剧和喜剧。

For if you observed children playing with them, you would notice something very strange. Seldom would they act out scenes from the movie, as an adult might expect. Instead, they would make up all kinds of stories featuring these characters with only a loose relationship to the plotline from the movie, which was fairly complex and somewhat difficult for a child to fully comprehend. This might lead you to conclude that it was the characters that were so popular, not the story from Star Wars. But often, you would see children give these characters completely different names, and completely different relationships than they had in the film, as they enacted dramas and comedies starring this cast of characters in bedrooms and backyards everywhere in the world.

那么,如果孩子们不是因为故事情节或角色而如此兴奋,那还剩下什么呢?答案是,星球大战的世界如此引人入胜——玩具提供了进入那个世界的另一扇大门——在某些方面,这个世界比电影更好,因为它具有互动性、参与性、灵活性、便携性和社交性。奇怪的是,这些玩具让星球大战世界对孩子们来说更有意义,而不是更少意义,因为玩具让他们能够访问这个世界,塑造它,改变它,让它成为自己的世界。随着星球大战续集的出现,人们充满了期待,但这种期待有多少是出于想听新故事的渴望,又有多少是出于重新进入那个世界的兴奋?

So, if it wasn’t the plotline or the characters that the kids were so excited by, then what was left? The answer is that it was the world of Star Wars that was so compelling—and the toys provided another gateway into that world—one that was better than the movie, in some ways, since it was interactive, participatory, flexible, portable, and social. And weirdly, these toys made the Star Wars world more meaningful for children, not less, because the toys afforded them the ability to visit the world, sculpt it, change it, and make it their own. And as Star Wars sequels started to appear, there was great anticipation, but how much of that anticipation was a desire to hear a new story and how much of it was the excitement of reentering that world?

亨利·詹金斯创造了“跨媒体世界”这个术语,指的是可以通过多种不同媒体进入的幻想世界——印刷品、视频、动画、玩具、游戏等等。这是一个非常有用的概念,因为它真的就像是世界独立于支持它的媒体而存在。很多人觉得这是一个奇怪的概念——他们认为书籍、电影、游戏和玩具是独立的东西,各自独立。但越来越多的时候,创造的真正产品不是故事、玩具或游戏,而是一个世界。但你不能出售一个世界,所以这些不同的产品被当作进入这个世界的门户来出售,每个门户都通向它的不同部分。如果这个世界构建得很好,你访问的门户越多,你想象中的世界就会越真实、越坚实。但如果这些门户相互矛盾或提供不一致的信息,世界就会很快分崩离析,产品突然变得一文不值。

Henry Jenkins coined the term transmedia worlds to refer to fantasy worlds that can be entered through many different media—print, video, animation, toys, games, and many others. This is a very useful concept, for it really is as if the world exists apart from the media that support it. Many people find this a bizarre concept—they think of books, films, games, and toys as separate things, each standing on their own. But more and more often, the real product that is created is not a story, or a toy, or a game, but a world. But you can’t sell a world, so these various products are sold as gateways into this world, each leading to different parts of it. And if the world is well constructed, the more gateways you visit, the more real and solid the world will become in your imagination. But if these gateways contradict each other or provide inconsistent information, the world crumbles quickly into dust and ashes, and suddenly the products are worth nothing.

这是为什么?为什么世界对我们来说如此真实,比定义它们的媒体还要真实?这是因为我们希望它们是真实的。我们内心的一部分想要相信这些世界不仅仅是书中的故事、规则或屏幕上的演员,而是这些世界确实存在,也许,不知何故,总有一天,我们可以找到通往它们的路。

Why is this? Why do worlds become so real for us, more real than the media that define them? It is because we want them to be real. Some part of us wants to believe that these worlds aren’t just stories in books, sets of rules, or actors on a screen, but that these worlds actually exist and that maybe, somehow, someday, we can find our way to them.

这就是为什么人们会随意扔掉杂志,却会在扔掉漫画书之前犹豫不决——毕竟,里面还有一个世界。

This is why people so casually throw out magazines but hesitate before throwing out a comic book—after all, there’s a world in there.

宝可梦的力量

The Power of Pokémon

宠物小精灵可以说是有史以来最成功的跨媒体世界之一。自推出以来,所有宠物小精灵产品的总销售额超过 900 亿美元,使其成为有史以来第二大最赚钱的电子游戏系列,仅次于马里奥。尽管许多人试图将其视为短期时尚,但十五年后,新的宠物小精灵游戏一直是畅销产品。了解宠物小精灵的历史有助于更好地理解其跨媒体世界的力量。

Pokémon is arguably one of the most successful transmedia worlds of all time. Since its introduction, the combined sales of all Pokémon products combined is over $90 billion, making it the second most lucrative videogame franchise of all time, second only to Mario. And though many tried to write it off as a short-term fad, over fifteen years later, new Pokémon games are consistently top sellers. It is worth understanding the history of Pokémon to better understand the power of its transmedia world.

Pokémon 最初是任天堂 Game Boy 系统的一款游戏。它的设计师 Tajiri Satoshi 小时候收集过昆虫,1991 年他看到了允许两台 Game Boy 之间传递信息的“游戏链接”功能,于是他便有了昆虫沿着电缆移动的设想。他向任天堂提出了这个想法,然后他和他的团队花了五年时间开发和完善这个游戏。1996 年,口袋妖怪(日文直译)作为一对游戏(红色和绿版(英语:green)发布。它本质上是一款传统的 RPG(与《创世纪》《最终幻想》不同),只不过你可以捕捉你战斗的怪物并让它们成为你的团队的一部分。

Pokémon began as a game for the Nintendo Game Boy system. Its designer, Tajiri Satoshi, had collected insects as a boy, and seeing the “game link” feature that allowed message passing between two Game Boys in 1991, he had a vision of insects traveling along the cable. He approached Nintendo about the idea, and then he and his team spent five years developing and perfecting the title. In 1996, Pocket Monsters (the direct translation of the Japanese title) as a pair of games (red and green) was launched. It was essentially a traditional RPG (not unlike Ultima or Final Fantasy), except that you could capture the monsters you fought and make them part of your team.

图像和游戏动作并不精致或先进,但互动丰富有趣,因为团队花了五年时间对游戏进行适当平衡。重要的是要意识到图像实际上有多么原始。最初的 Game Boy 只允许四种橄榄色的图像,两只战斗中的 Pokémon 基本上会并排站着,当玩家从简单的菜单中选择攻击时会扭动身体。

The graphics and game action were not elaborate or advanced—but the interactions were rich and interesting, since the team had spent five years to properly balance the game. It is important to realize how primitive the graphics really were. The original Game Boy only allowed four shades of olive for the graphics, and two battling Pokémon would basically stand next to each other and wiggle as the player chose attacks from a simple menu.

这款游戏大获成功,以至于很快就计划出版漫画书和动画系列。与许多与其所基于的电子游戏只有松散联系的电视节目(例如,糟糕的汉纳巴伯拉吃豆人动画片)不同,《宠物小精灵》节目非常紧密地反映了游戏的复杂规则,主角的冒险直接基于 Game Boy 游戏中的任务路径。结果是,这部节目如此反映了游戏的机制,观看它的玩家可以更好地理解在游戏中应该使用哪些策略。

The game was a huge success—so much so that a comic book and an anime series were soon planned. Unlike many TV shows that are only loosely connected to the videogame they were based on (e.g., the dreadful Hanna Barbera Pac-Man cartoon), the Pokémon show reflected the intricate rules of the gameplay very closely, and the adventures of the main character were directly based on the quest path through the Game Boy game. The result was a show that so mirrored the mechanics of the game, that watching it players better understood what strategies to use in the game.

但最重要的是,电视节目为玩家打开了进入 Pokémon 世界的新大门——通过戏剧性的动画和声音,向玩家展示了全彩色的 Pokémon。当观众回到 Game Boy 时,这些生动的图像保留在他们的想象中,使得 Game Boy 图形和声音的粗糙完全无关紧要。如第 13 章平衡中所述,这有时被称为“双目效应”,之所以这样命名,是因为它就像人们带着双筒望远镜去看体育赛事或带着歌剧眼镜去剧院一样。没有人会通过双筒望远镜观看整个事件。相反,双筒望远镜早期被用来近距离观察远处的身影。一旦有人近距离观察了它们,他们就可以在视觉想象中将该图像映射到他们在舞台上看到的微小人物上。

But most importantly, the TV show gave players a new gateway into the Pokémon universe—one that showed the Pokémon in full color with dramatic animation and sound. When viewers would return to the Game Boy, these vivid images were retained in their imaginations, making the crudeness of Game Boy graphics and sound completely irrelevant. As mentioned in Chapter 13: Balance, this is sometimes called the “binocular effect,” so named because it is like when people take binoculars to a sporting event or opera glasses to the theater. No one watches the whole event through the binoculars. Instead, the binoculars are used early on to give a close-up view of the distant figures. Once someone has seen them close up, they can map that image onto the tiny figures they see on the stage in their visual imagination.

这两个门户具有巨大的协同作用——想要在游戏中取得成功给了观看电视节目的理由,而观看电视节目使玩游戏变得更加生动和令人兴奋。

These two gateways had tremendous synergy—wanting to succeed at the game gave reasons to watch the TV show, and watching the TV show made playing the game more vivid and exciting.

如果这还不够的话,1999 年,任天堂与制作了突破性收藏卡牌游戏《万智牌》的威世智公司合作,创造了一款基于神奇宝贝世界的全新收藏卡牌游戏。这款游戏和电视节目一样,尽可能地保留了 Game Boy 游戏的核心机制。这为玩家提供了进入这个世界的第三种方式——既便携又具有社交性。尽管 Game Boy 游戏配备了用于交易神奇宝贝的游戏连接线,但事实是玩家只是偶尔使用它——大多数时候,它都是作为一场单人冒险来玩的。但纸牌游戏并非如此——它的低廉价格和易用性使其在儿童(尤其是男孩)中非常受欢迎,利用了他们与同龄人竞争的兴趣,自然而然地符合了神奇宝贝“Gotta catch'em all!” 的口号。

And if this wasn’t enough, in 1999, Nintendo worked with Wizards of the Coast, the company that produced the breakthrough Magic: The Gathering collectible card game, to create a new collectible card game, based on the world of Pokémon. This game, like the TV show, held as closely as possible to the core mechanics of the Game Boy game. This gave players a third method of entry into this world—one that was both portable and very social. Although the Game Boy game featured the game link cable for trading Pokémon, the truth was that players only used it occasionally—most of the time, it was played as a solo adventure. Not so with the card game—its low price and accessibility made it very popular with children (especially boys), playing off their interest in competing with their peers and fitting in naturally with the Pokémon slogan of “Gotta catch’em all!”

这三个互补的入口通向一个单一的坚实世界,使该物业成为一股几乎不可阻挡的力量。不了解神奇宝贝世界的人完全不知所措:这东西是游戏,还是电视节目,还是什么?故事情节有什么好到让孩子们愿意为它花这么多钱?1999 年,我有幸参加了一场圆桌讨论,与一家大型娱乐公司的负责人进行了交流。有人问他对“神奇宝贝热潮”有何看法,他回答说:“电影几个月后上映,到时候就结束了。”当然,他错了,因为他根本不了解跨媒体世界的概念。他完全陷入了好莱坞对故事世界的旧思维方式——一部好莱坞大片定义了世界,然后有玩具、游戏和电视节目模仿它。一个可以基于掌上电子游戏规则的世界,或者一个可以随着每一种新媒体的加入而变得更强大的世界,对他来说完全陌生(他不再负责那家公司了)。

These three complementary gateways into a single solid world made the property a near unstoppable force. People who didn’t understand the Pokémon universe were completely bewildered: Is this thing a game, or a TV show, or what? What is it about the storyline that is so great that kids want to spend all this money on it? I was fortunate enough to be at a roundtable discussion in 1999 with the head of a major entertainment company. Someone asked him what he thought of “this Pokémon craze,” and he replied, “The movie comes out in a few months, and that’ll be the end of it.” He was wrong, of course, because he fundamentally did not get the idea of transmedia worlds. He was completely mired in the old Hollywood way of thinking about story worlds—a big Hollywood movie defines the world, then there are toys, games, and TV shows that mimic that. The idea of a world that could be based in the ruleset of a handheld videogame or a world that could get stronger with each new medium you add to it was completely unfamiliar to him (he is not in charge of that company any longer).

Pokémon 的优势不仅在于游戏理念,还在于谨慎且持续地使用多种媒体作为进入单一且明确界定的世界的门户。

The strength of Pokémon is not just in the game concept, but in the careful and consistent use of multiple media as gateways into a single, well-defined world.

跨媒体世界的属性

Properties of Transmedia Worlds

跨媒体世界有几个使其变得有趣的特性。

Transmedia worlds have several properties that make them interesting.

跨媒体世界力量强大

Transmedia Worlds Are Powerful

成功的跨媒体世界对粉丝产生了强大的影响。这种影响远不止粉丝对有趣故事的热爱。这个世界几乎变成了粉丝们幻想着前往的某种个人乌托邦。有时,这些幻想是短期的,但对许多人来说,它们是长期的,会持续一生。对一些人来说,这些长期幻想是他们偶尔寻求精神放松的东西。一个把变形金刚玩具当作装饰品放在身边的成年人可能就是一个很好的例子。这个玩具为他们提供了一个方便的精神门户,让他们可以偶尔进入变形金刚的世界。

Successful transmedia worlds exert a powerful effect over fans. It is stronger than just a fan’s love of an interesting story. It is almost as if the world becomes a sort of personal utopia that they fantasize about visiting. Sometimes, these fantasies are short term, but for many, they are long term, lasting on through their lives. For some, these long-term fantasies are something they turn to, now and then, for a sort of mental break. An adult who keeps a Transformer toy around as a decoration might be a good example of this. The toy gives them a convenient mental gateway to the world of Transformers that they can visit occasionally.

但对其他人来说,对这种个人乌托邦的热爱成为了他们每天积极参与的事情。斯科特·爱德华·纳尔就是如此,他在 30 岁生日时合法地将自己的名字改为擎天柱,他是变形金刚宇宙的主要机器人之一。事实上,如果你观察任何类型小说的“铁杆粉丝”,你都会发现,在几乎所有情况下,拥有最忠实粉丝的作品都是跨媒体世界最强大的作品。《星际迷航》《星球大战》《变形金刚》《指环王》、《漫威漫画》、《哈利波特》和许多其他流行作品的核心都是一个世界。与享受好的故事情节或欣赏有趣的角色相比,进入幻想世界的渴望似乎才是驱使这些粉丝走向极端的原因。正如我们在第 17 章故事中讨论的那样,幻想是游戏中非常重要的概念,它往往构成了你的世界的支柱。为了确保你记得捕捉幻想的史诗力量,请用这个镜头。

But for others, the passion for this personal utopia becomes something they actively engage in every day. Such was certainly the case with Scott Edward Nall, who on his 30th birthday legally changed his name to Optimus Prime, one of the lead robots in the Transformers Universe. In fact, if you look at “hardcore fans” of any kind of fiction, you will find that in almost all cases, the properties with the most devoted fans are the ones that are the strongest transmedia worlds. Star Trek, Star Wars, Transformers, Lord of the Rings, Marvel Comics, Harry Potter, and many other popular properties have a world at their core. More than the enjoyment of a good storyline, or the appreciation of interesting characters, the desire to enter a fantasy world seems to be what propels these fans to such extremes. As we discussed in Chapter 17: Story, fantasy is such an important concept in games that often forms the anchor for your world. To be sure you remember to capture the epic power of fantasy, take this lens.

跨媒体世界长久存在

Transmedia Worlds Are Long Lived

跨媒体世界持续的时间之长令人惊讶。超人出现于七十五年前。詹姆斯·邦德已经存在六十年了。星际迷航神秘博士在五十年后仍然蓬勃发展。沃尔特·迪士尼开始开发漫画书以帮助保持其动画世界活力,并为此创建了迪士尼乐园,他意识到了跨媒体的力量。他投资这样一个不同寻常的项目的最有力理由之一是,这将有助于保持公众对迪士尼电影的兴趣,为他们提供另一个进入电影世界的大门。1998 年的《版权期限延长法案》将公司版权期限从 75 年延长至 95 年。这在很大程度上是由于一些仍然有利可图的资产(例如早期的米老鼠动画片)有落入公共领域的危险。无论对错,有人认为该法案通过的原因之一似乎是让一个精心管理、深受喜爱的世界落入坏人之手感觉不对。

Solid transmedia worlds continue for a surprisingly long time. Superman appeared over seventy-five years ago. James Bond has been around for sixty years. Star Trek and Doctor Who still thrive after fifty years. Walt Disney realized the power of transmedia as he started developing comic books to help keep the worlds of his animation properties alive and created Disneyland to this same end. One of his strongest arguments for investing in such an unusual venture was that it would help keep up the public’s interest in Disney films by giving them another gateway into the world of the films. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended the length of corporate copyrights from 75 to 95 years. This was greatly spurred by the fact that some still lucrative properties (such as early Mickey Mouse cartoons) were in danger of falling into the public domain. Right or wrong, some have suggested that one of the reasons that this act passed seems to be that it just feels wrong to let a carefully managed, well-beloved world fall into the wrong hands.

培育强大的跨媒体世界的一个非常好的理由是,如果你做得好,它可以在很长一段时间内带来利润。这对于吸引儿童的世界来说尤其如此——当孩子们长大成人时,他们往往想和他们的孩子分享这个世界,形成一个可以持续很长时间的循环。

One very good reason to cultivate a strong transmedia world is that if you do it well, it can be profitable for a very long time. This seems particularly true for worlds that appeal to children—when the children grow into adulthood, they often want to share the worlds with their children, creating a cycle that can go on a very long time.

跨媒体世界随着时间的推移而发展

Transmedia Worlds Evolve over Time

但这些世界并非随着时间的推移而保持静止——它们在不断演变。考虑一个已有一百多年历史(至今仍然很受欢迎!)的跨媒体世界:夏洛克·福尔摩斯的世界。当我们今天想到夏洛克·福尔摩斯时,我们通常会想到他在他的标志性猎鹿帽和超大号的葫芦烟斗。但如果你读过福尔摩斯故事的文本,你会发现文本中并没有提到这些东西。猎鹿帽最早出现在西德尼·佩吉特的插图中,他自己也喜欢戴猎鹿帽。后来,演员威廉·吉列特在根据这些故事创作的一系列戏剧中扮演了福尔摩斯,他戴上了这顶不寻常的帽子,还加上了超大号的烟斗,因为即使在剧院的后排,它也会显得清晰可见。这些戏剧非常受欢迎,以至于福尔摩斯故事的未来插图画家都以吉列特的照片为原型来绘制插图。奇怪的是,烟斗和帽子成了福尔摩斯的标志——这是他的创造者阿瑟·柯南·道尔从未想象过的标志。但这就是跨媒体世界的方式——随着新媒体为世界提供新的门户,世界本身(或人们对它的看法,这与想象世界是一样的)会发生变化以适应新的门户。

But these worlds do not remain static over time—they evolve. Consider a transmedia world over a hundred years old (and still popular!): the world of Sherlock Holmes. When we think of Sherlock Holmes today, we typically think of him in his trademark deerstalker cap and oversized calabash pipe. But if you read the text of the Sherlock Holmes stories, these items are not mentioned in the text. The cap first appears in illustrations by Sidney Paget, who liked wearing a deerstalker cap himself. Later, actor William Gillette, who portrayed Holmes in a series of plays based on the stories built on that by wearing the unusual hat and adding the oversized pipe because it would be distinct and visible even from the back row of a theater. The plays were immensely popular, so much so that future illustrators of the Holmes stories used photos of Gillette as a model for their illustrations. Weirdly, the pipe and cap have become the icons for Sherlock Holmes—icons that his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, never envisioned. But this is the way of transmedia worlds—as new media provide new gateways to the world, the world itself (or people’s perception of it, which amounts to the same thing for an imaginary world) changes to accommodate the new gateways.

另一个绝佳的例子来自一个更古老、更受人喜爱的跨媒体世界——圣诞老人的世界。如果曾经有一个人们真正希望成为现实的幻想乌托邦,那就是圣诞老人的世界——这个世界里,每年一次,一位仁慈的人物会仔细考虑你的心愿,如果你值得,就会把它给你。想想进入这个世界的许多途径:不仅有故事、诗歌、歌曲和电影,你还可以给他写信,甚至拜访圣诞老人本人!想想看——一个虚构的人物来到你家,吃掉你的饼干,然后留下一大堆礼物!我们如此渴望这个世界的存在,以至于数以百万计的人不惜花费巨资,用欺骗手段让孩子们相信这是一个不容置疑的现实。

Another excellent example of this comes from an even older and more beloved transmedia world—the world of Santa Claus. If ever there was a fantasy utopia that people truly want to be real, it is Santa’s world—a world where once a year a benevolent figure carefully considers your heart’s desire, and gives it to you if you are worthy. Consider the many paths of entry to this world: Not only are there stories, poems, songs, and movies, but you can write him letters, and even visit Santa himself! Just think of it—a fictional character comes to your house and eats your cookies and then leaves behind a treasure trove of gifts! We so badly want this world to exist that millions of people go to tremendous expense and feats of deception to make children believe it to be an unquestionable reality.

但这个世界的作者是谁?像所有经久不衰的跨媒体世界一样,这是一个伟大的合作成果。讲故事的人和艺术家们不断尝试扩充圣诞老人的世界。有些人成功了,比如克莱门特·摩尔 (Clement Moore) 于 1823 年引入了圣诞老人的驯鹿,罗伯特·L·梅 (Robert L. May) 于 1939 年引入了鲁道夫。其他许多人都失败了。《绿野仙踪》故事的作者弗兰克·鲍姆 (L. Frank Baum) 是一位讲故事的人,但他在 1902 年出版的《圣诞老人的生活和冒险》中却惨遭失败,该书试图将圣诞老人的起源确立为一个由仙女、侏儒和恶魔组成的理事会选中的永生凡人。

But who is the author of this world? Like all long-lived transmedia worlds, it was a great collaborative effort. Storytellers and artists continually try to augment Santa’s world. Some succeed, like the introduction of Santa’s reindeer by Clement Moore in 1823, or the introduction of Rudolph by Robert L. May in 1939. Many others fail. No less a storyteller than L. Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz stories, failed miserably with his 1902 Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which attempted to establish Santa’s origin as a mortal selected for immortality by a council of nymphs, gnomes, and demons.

谁来决定哪些新功能进入跨媒体世界,哪些被拒绝?这在某种程度上是我们集体意识的一部分。通过某种不言而喻的民主程序,每个人都可以决定某个功能是否合适,而虚构世界会稍作改变以适应。没有正式的决定——它只是发生了。如果一个故事功能很受欢迎,它就会扎根。如果不喜欢,它就会消失。从长远来看,世界是由那些访问它的人统治的。

Who decides which new features enter a transmedia world, and which ones are rejected? It somehow happens as part of our collective consciousness. Through some unspoken democratic process, everyone just decides whether a particular feature seems appropriate or inappropriate, and the fictional world changes slightly to accommodate. There is no formal decision—it just happens. If a story feature is well-liked, it takes root. If not, it fades away. In the long run, the world is governed by those who visit it.

成功的跨媒体世界有哪些共同点

What Successful Transmedia Worlds Have in Common

成功的跨媒体世界是强大而有价值的——那么它们有什么共同点呢?

Successful transmedia worlds are powerful and valuable—so what do they have in common?

  • 它们往往扎根于单一媒介:尽管跨媒体世界有众多入口,但最成功的跨媒体世界都是从在一种媒介上引起轰动开始的。《福尔摩斯》是连载小说。《超人》是一本漫画书。《星球大战》是一部电影。 《星际迷航》是一部电视节目。《宠物小精灵》是一款掌上游戏。《变形金刚》是一种玩具。所有这些作品都以许多其他形式出现,但每一种作品在其原始媒介中都最为强大。

  • They tend to be rooted in a single medium: For all of their many gateways, the most successful of the transmedia worlds started out by making a huge splash in just one medium. Sherlock Holmes was serialized fiction. Superman was a comic book. Star Wars was a movie. Star Trek was a TV show. Pokémon was a handheld game. Transformers were a toy. All of these have appeared in many other forms, but each is at its very strongest when in its original medium.

  • 它们具有直观性:在为Toontown Online做研究时,我尝试尽可能多地了解Toontown这个虚构的世界。当我研究电影《谁陷害了兔子罗杰》时,我意识到电影中对Toontown的描述非常少。电影不需要详细描述Toontown,因为每个人都已经知道它的存在。虽然没有人明确地说过,但所有卡通人物都生活在一个与我们截然不同的卡通世界中,这在某种程度上是常识。超人和蝙蝠侠的创造者肯定从未打算让他们的角色与其他超级英雄共享这个世界,但漫画读者直观地知道这些角色生活在同一个世界中 — — 现在他们确实如此。

  • They are intuitive: When doing research for Toontown Online, I tried to learn as much as I could about the fictional world of Toontown. As I studied the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I realized that very little about Toontown was really described there. The film didn’t need to describe Toontown in great detail because everyone already knew it existed. Without anyone ever expressly saying it, it was somehow common knowledge that all cartoon characters live together in a cartoon universe that is very different than ours. The creators of Superman and Batman surely never had any intention that their characters shared the world with other superheroes, but it was intuitive to comic readers that these characters lived in the same world—and so now they do.

  • 他们的核心是富有创造力的个体:大多数成功的跨媒体世界都植根于个人的想象力和审美风格。沃尔特·迪斯尼、宫本茂、弗兰克·鲍姆、田尻聪、吉姆·汉森、JK·罗琳和乔治·卢卡斯等人都是例子。有时,小型、紧密的团队能够创造成功的跨媒体世界,但成功的世界由大型团队创造的情况非常罕见。一个人对世界的整体视野赋予了它力量、坚固性、完整性和美感,这是在众多门户的压力下生存所必需的。

  • They have a creative individual at their core: The majority of successful transmedia worlds are rooted in the imagination and aesthetic styling of a single individual. People like Walt Disney, Shigeru Miyamoto, L. Frank Baum, Tajiri Satoshi, Jim Henson, J.K. Rowling, and George Lucas are all examples. Occasionally, small, tight teams are able to create successful transmedia worlds, but it is very rare indeed for successful worlds to be created by large teams. There is something about the holistic vision of a world that comes to a single individual that gives it the strength, solidity, integrity, and beauty necessary to survive the pressure of many gateways.

  • 它们有助于讲述许多故事:成功的跨媒体世界从来不是围绕单一的故事线展开的。它们具有远超单一故事线的坚固性和相互联系性。它们为未来的故事和游客想象自己的故事留出了空间。

  • They facilitate the telling of many stories: Successful transmedia worlds are never based around a single plotline. They have a solidity and an interconnectedness that goes far beyond that. They leave room for future stories and for guests to imagine their own stories.

  • 它们通过任何入口都有意义:几乎所有电影的致命弱点都是“如果你读过这本书,它就会更有意义。”你永远不知道客人会首先进入哪个入口,所以你必须让所有入口都同样吸引人和受欢迎。神奇宝贝在这方面确实取得了成功——它的电视节目、漫画、视频和纸牌游戏本身都很容易理解和有趣。其中任何一个都可能是与神奇宝贝世界的初次接触,并可能导致以后进入其他入口。

    一个反例是《黑客帝国》世界中尝试的一些事情。《黑客帝国》是一款根据第二部电影《黑客帝国:重装上阵》改编的电子游戏,受到批评,它采用了一种新颖的方法,不讲述电影的故事,而是讲述与电影相交叉的平行故事。这是一个有趣的想法,但如果你没有看过这部电影,就会感到困惑。同样,《黑客帝国动画版》是一系列只发生在黑客帝国宇宙中的动画短片如果观众已经熟悉了黑客帝国宇宙,那么这种做法就说得通了。这种“只有通过所有通道才能理解”的做法对一些人来说很有趣,但对大多数人来说却很疏远。

  • They make sense through any of their gateways: One kiss of death for almost any movie is the phrase “It makes more sense if you read the book.” You never know which gateway guests might enter first, so you must make all of them equally inviting and welcoming. Pokémon certainly succeeded in this regard—its TV show, comic, video, and card games were each understandable and enjoyable in their own right. Any of these could be a first encounter with the world of Pokémon that might lead to other ports of entry later on.

    A counterexample would be some of the things that were attempted with the world of The Matrix. Enter The Matrix, a critically panned videogame based on the second film, Matrix: Reloaded, took the novel approach of not telling the story of the movie, but rather a parallel story that intersected with the movie. This was an interesting idea, but if you didn’t see the movie, it was confusing. Similarly, Animatrix, a series of animated shorts that happen in the Matrix universe only make sense if the viewer is already intimate with the Matrix universe. This “it only makes sense if you enter through all the gateways” approach was intriguing for a few, but alienating for most.

  • 它们通常与发现有关:这是有道理的,因为一个关于发现的世界鼓励从许多门户进行访问。

  • They are often about discovery: This makes sense because a world about discovery encourages visits from many gateways.

  • 它们是关于愿望实现的:想象一个幻想世界需要做很多工作。除非这个世界是玩家真正想去的世界,即一个可以实现他们一些深刻而重要的愿望的世界,否则玩家不会这么做。

  • They are about wish fulfillment: Imagining a fantasy world is a lot of work. Players will not do it unless it is a world that they truly would like to visit—a world that fulfills some deep and important wish.

跨媒体世界是娱乐业的未来。仅专注于在单一媒体中创造出色的体验已远远不够。越来越多的设计师被要求创造通往现有世界的新通道——这不是一项简单的任务。但那些能够创造通道以创造性地为玩家提供新视角和享受已知世界乐趣的人备受追捧。但更受追捧的是那些能够从了解观众的秘密愿望开始创造成功的跨媒体世界的人。如果您想创建或改进跨媒体世界,请使用此视角。

Transmedia worlds are the future of entertainment. It is no longer sufficient to focus just on creating a great experience in a single medium. Increasingly, designers are asked to create new gateways to existing worlds—not an easy task. But those who can create gateways that excite players by creatively giving them a new perspective on and enjoyment of a known world are much sought after. But even more sought after are those who can invent a successful transmedia world starting with nothing but an understanding of their audience’s secret wishes. If you want to create or improve transmedia worlds, use this lens.

强大的跨媒体世界并非只是空荡荡的地方。让它们变得有趣的很大一部分原因在于谁住在那里。这正是我们现在关注的重点。

Strong transmedia worlds are not just empty places. A huge part of what makes them interesting is who lives there. It is this we turn our attention to now.

第二十

CHAPTER TWENTY

世界包含人物

Worlds Contain Characters



20.1

FIGURE

20.1

游戏角色的本质

The Nature of Game Characters

如果我们要制作具有精彩故事的游戏,这些故事必须包含令人难忘的角色。一个重要的问题是:游戏中的角色与其他媒体中的角色有何不同?如果我们并排检查各种媒体中的虚构角色,就会发现一些差异。以下是我从 20 世纪最佳小说、电影和视频游戏列表中选择的一些样本。

If we are to create games that have great stories in them, these stories must contain memorable characters. It is an important question to ask: How are characters in games different than characters in other media? If we examine fictional characters in various media side by side, some differences become apparent. Here are some samples I chose from lists of the best novels, films, and videogames of the twentieth century.

小说人物

Novel Characters

  • 霍尔顿·考尔菲德《麦田里的守望者》。霍尔顿是一名与成人世界的虚伪和丑陋做斗争的青少年。

  • Holden Caulfield: The Catcher in the Rye. Holden is a teenager who wrestles with the phoniness and ugliness of the adult world.

  • 亨伯特·亨伯特《洛丽塔》。亨伯特是一个对青春期女孩充满欲望的成年人。

  • Humbert Humbert: Lolita. Humbert is an adult consumed by lust for an adolescent girl.

  • 汤姆·乔德《愤怒的葡萄》。汤姆是一名前罪犯,在失去农场后,他试图帮助家人。

  • Tom Joad: The Grapes of Wrath. Tom is an ex-convict who tries to help his family after they lose their farm.

  • 拉尔夫蝇王。拉尔夫和许多其他孩子被困在一个岛上,他们试图在岛上和彼此之间生存下来。

  • Ralph: Lord of the Flies. Ralph and many other children are stranded on an island and try to survive the island and each other.

  • 塞丝宠儿。塞丝和女儿逃离奴役后,努力重建生活。

  • Sethe: Beloved. Sethe is a woman who tries to rebuild her life after she and her daughter escape from slavery.

电影角色

Movie Characters

  • 里克·布莱恩《卡萨布兰卡》。里克必须在一生挚爱和挽救她丈夫的生命之间做出选择。

  • Rick Blaine: Casablanca. Rick must choose between the love of his life and saving the life of her husband.

  • 印第安纳琼斯夺宝奇兵。一名富有冒险精神的考古学家必须从纳粹手中拯救约柜。

  • Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. An adventurous archaeologist must rescue the Ark of the Covenant from the Nazis.

  • 罗斯·德薇特·布卡特《泰坦尼克号》。一位年轻女子在命运多舛的泰坦尼克号上坠入爱河。

  • Rose DeWitt Bukater: Titanic. A young woman falls in love on the ill-fated Titanic.

  • 诺曼·贝茨精神病患者。一名患有罕见精神分裂症的男子犯下谋杀罪并试图掩盖罪行。

  • Norman Bates: Psycho. A man with an unusual case of schizophrenia commits murders and tries to cover them up.

  • 唐·洛克伍德《雨中曲》。一位无声电影演员努力转型为有声电影演员。

  • Don Lockwood: Singin’ in the Rain. A silent film actor struggles to make the transition to talkies.

游戏角色

Game Characters

  • 马里奥超级马里奥兄弟。卡通人物水管工与敌人战斗,从邪恶国王手中救出公主。

  • Mario: Super Mario Brothers. A cartoon plumber battles enemies to rescue a princess from an evil king.

  • Solid Snake合金装备。一名退役士兵潜入核武器处理设施以消除恐怖主义威胁。

  • Solid Snake: Metal Gear Solid. A retired soldier infiltrates a nuclear weapons disposal facility to neutralize a terrorist threat.

  • 克劳德·斯特莱夫最终幻想 VII。一群叛军试图打败一个由邪恶巫师经营的邪恶大公司。

  • Cloud Strife: Final Fantasy VII. A band of rebels tries to defeat an evil megacorporation run by an evil wizard.

  • 链接塞尔达传说。一名年轻男子必须找回一件魔法物品,才能从恶棍手中拯救公主。

  • Link: Legend of Zelda. A young man must recover a magic artifact to rescue a princess from a villain.

  • 戈登·弗里曼《半条命 2》。当一项实验出现严重错误时,物理学家必须与外星人作战。

  • Gordon Freeman: Half-Life 2. A physicist must battle aliens when an experiment goes horribly wrong.

那么,检查这些列表,我们看到了什么模式?

So, examining these lists, what patterns do we see?

  • 精神身体。小说中的人物都经历了深刻的精神斗争。这是有道理的,因为在小说中,我们花了很多时间倾听人物内心的想法。电影中的角色既有情感斗争,也有身体斗争,这些斗争通过交流和行动的结合来解决。同样,当你考虑媒介时,这是有道理的:我们听不到电影人物的想法,但我们可以看到他们说什么、做什么。最后,游戏人物的冲突几乎完全是身体上的。由于这些角色大多没有思想(玩家替他们思考),而且只是偶尔能说话,这同样是完全有道理的。在这三种情况下,人物都是由他们的媒介定义的。

  • MentalPhysical. The characters in the novels are involved in deep psychic struggles. This makes sense, since in a novel we spend much of our time listening to the characters’ innermost thoughts. The characters in the movies are involved in both emotional and physical struggles, which are resolved through combinations of communication and action. Again, when you consider the medium, this makes sense: We cannot hear the thoughts of film characters, but we can see what they say and do. Finally, the game characters are involved in conflicts that are almost entirely physical. Since these characters mostly have no thoughts (the player does the thinking for them) and are only occasionally able to speak, this again makes perfect sense. In all three cases, the characters are defined by their media.

  • 现实幻想。小说往往以现实为基础;电影往往扎根于现实,但往往偏向幻想,游戏世界几乎完全是幻想场景。角色也反映了这一点——他们是环境的产物。

  • RealityFantasy. The novels tend to be very reality based; the films tend to be rooted in reality, but often pushing toward fantasy, and the game worlds are almost entirely fantasy situations. And the characters reflect this—they are products of their environment.

  • 复杂简单。由于各种原因,从小说到游戏,情节的复杂性和角色的深度逐渐降低。

  • ComplexSimple. For a variety of reasons, the complexity of the plots and depth of the characters gradually diminishes as we move from novels to games.

由此,人们可能会得出结论,游戏注定会让简单的幻想角色主要参与身体动作。这当然是一条捷径。毕竟,在游戏中,你可以只用动作来表现,而在电影或小说中通常做不到这一点。但这并不意味着你不可能在游戏中添加更多深度、更多心理冲突和更有趣的角色关系——这只是意味着这很有挑战性。此列表中的某些游戏,例如《最终幻想 VII》,围绕简单的游戏结构构建了非常复杂的角色关系——尽管这些关系很复杂,但玩家迫切需要更多——他们希望他们的游戏拥有更丰富、更有意义的角色和故事情节。在本章的大部分内容中,我们将研究其他媒体的讲故事者用来定义角色的方法,并考虑如何将这些方法应用于创造强大的游戏角色。

From this, one might conclude that games are doomed to have simple fantasy characters engaging mostly in physical actions. And that certainly is the easy path. After all, you can get away with mere action in games when you usually can’t in movies or novels. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to add more depth, more mental conflict, and more interesting character relationships into your games—it just means that it is challenging. Some of the games on this list, Final Fantasy VII, for instance, have very involved sets of character relationships structured around a simple gameplay structure—as involved as they are, players are crying out for more—they want their games to have richer, more meaningful characters and storylines. For much of this chapter, we will be looking at methods that storytellers in other media use to define their characters and consider how we can adapt these methods to the creation of strong game characters.

让我们从一个非常特殊的角色开始:头像。

Let’s start with a very special character: the avatar.

头像

Avatars

玩家在游戏中控制的角色有一种神奇的魔力,神奇到我们给这个角色起了一个特殊的名字:化身。这个词源于源于梵语,意指神灵在人间化身为人。这个名字非常适合游戏角色,因为当玩家使用角色进入游戏世界时,也会发生类似的神奇转变。

There is something magical about the character that a player controls in a game, so magical that we give that character a special name: the avatar. The word is derived from a Sanskrit word that refers to a god magically taking physical form on earth. And the name is well chosen for a game character, since a similarly magical transformation takes place when players use their avatar to enter the world of the game.

玩家和角色之间的关系很奇怪。有时玩家与角色明显不同,但有时玩家的精神状态完全投射到角色身上,以至于当角色受伤或受到威胁时,玩家会惊呼不已。这并不完全令人惊讶——毕竟,我们有能力将自己投射到我们控制的任何东西中。例如,当我们开车时,我们将自己的身份投射到汽车中,就好像它是我们自己的延伸一样。检查停车位时,我们经常会说“我觉得我坐不进去。”如果另一辆车与我们的车相撞,我们不会说“他撞了我的车!”而是说“他撞了我!”因此,我们可以将自己投射到我们直接控制的电子游戏角色中,这应该不足为奇。

The relationship between player and avatar is strange. There are times when the player is distinctly apart from the avatar, but other times when the player’s mental state is completely projected into the avatar, to the point that the player gasps if the avatar is injured or threatened. This should not be completely surprising—after all, we have the ability to project ourselves into just about anything we control. When we drive a car, for example, we project our identity into the car, as if it is an extension of ourselves. Examining a parking space, we will often say “I don’t think I can fit in there.” And if another car collides with our car, we don’t say “He hit my car!” Instead we say “He hit me!” So it should be no surprise that we can project ourselves into a videogame character that we have direct control over.

设计师经常争论第一人称视角和第三人称视角哪种更具沉浸感。一种观点认为,通过在没有可见虚拟形象的场景中提供第一人称视角可以获得更大的投射效果。然而,共情的力量是强大的,当控制可见虚拟形象时,客人常常会在看到自己的虚拟形象遭受打击时因想象中的痛苦而畏缩,或者在看到自己的虚拟形象逃脱身体伤害时松一口气。对于客人来说,虚拟形象几乎就像是一种动觉巫毒娃娃。保龄球运动员是这种现象的另一个例子,当保龄球沿着球道滚向球瓶时,他们试图对保龄球施加“身体英语”。这些动作很大程度上是下意识的,是保龄球运动员将自己投射到球上的结果。从这个意义上说,保龄球就是保龄球运动员的虚拟形象。

Designers often debate about which is more immersive: the first- or third-person view. One argument is that greater projection can be achieved by providing a first-person perspective on a scene with no visible avatar. However, the power of empathy is strong, and when controlling a visible avatar, guests often wince in imagined pain upon seeing their avatar suffer a blow or sigh in relief upon seeing their avatar escape physical harm. It is almost as if the avatar is a kind of kinesthetic voodoo doll for the guest. Bowlers are another example of this phenomenon, as they try to exert “body English” on a bowling ball as it rolls down the lane toward the pins. These movements are largely subconscious and are a result of a bowler projecting themself onto the ball. In this sense, the bowling ball serves as the bowler’s avatar.

将自己投射到角色中,就好像角色是一种工具一样,这是一回事,但如果我们真的以某种方式与角色产生联系,投射的体验就会更加强大。那么,什么样的角色最适合玩家将自己投射到角色中呢?

And it is one thing to project ourselves into our avatar as if our avatar is a tool, but the experience of projection can be so much more powerful if we actually relate to the character in some way. So, what kinds of characters are best suited for players to project themselves into?

理想形式

The Ideal Form

第一种适合作为虚拟形象的角色是玩家一直想成为的角色。这类角色——比如强大的战士、强大的巫师、迷人的公主、超级温文尔雅的秘密特工——会对人的心灵产生影响,因为我们内心的力量促使我们成为最好的自己,而将自己投射到理想化的形式中的想法非常有吸引力。虽然这些角色与我们的真实自我完全不一样,但他们是我们有时梦想成为的人。

The first type of character that is a good choice as an avatar is the kind that the player has always wanted to be. Characters like this—such as mighty warriors, powerful wizards, attractive princesses, ultra-suave secret agents—exert a pull on the psyche, since the force inside us that pushes us toward being our best finds the idea of projecting ourselves into an idealized form very appealing. Although these characters are not much like our real selves at all, they are people we sometimes dream about being.

白板

The Blank Slate

第二种适合作为形象的人物,正如斯科特·麦克劳德所说,是具有标志性的人物。麦克劳德在他出色的著作《理解漫画》中提出了一个有趣的观点:对一个角色的描述越少,读者将自己投射到该角色中的机会就越多。

The second type of character that works well as an avatar is one that is, as Scott McCloud puts it, iconic. In his excellent book, Understanding Comics, McCloud makes the interesting point that the less detail that goes into a character, the more opportunity the reader has to project themselves into that character.



20.2

FIGURE

20.2

(由 Harper Collins 提供。已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Harper Collins. Used with permission.)

麦克劳德进一步指出,在漫画中,通常情况下,那些看起来是外星人、异国情调或可怕的人物或环境会被赋予很多细节,因为细节越多,它们就越“与众不同”。当你将一个标志性人物与一个详细的世界结合起来时,你会得到一个强大的组合,正如麦克劳德在下面展示的那样:

McCloud further points out that in comics, it is often the case that characters or environments that are meant to seem alien, foreign, or scary are given a lot of detail, because more detail makes them more “other.” When you combine an iconic character with a detailed world, you get a powerful combination, as McCloud shows in the following:



20.3

FIGURE

20.3

(由 Harper Collins 提供。已获许可使用。)

(Courtesy of Harper Collins. Used with permission.)

这种想法的影响远远超出了漫画领域。在电子游戏中,我们看到了同样的现象。一些最受欢迎和最引人注目的形象是非常标志性的。以马里奥为例:他不是一个理想化的形象,但他很简单,几乎不说话,而且完全没有威胁性,所以很容易把自己投射到他身上。

This idea has bearing well beyond the domain of comics. In videogames, we see the same phenomenon. Some of the most popular and compelling avatars are ones that are very iconic. Consider Mario: He isn’t much of an idealized form, but he is simple, hardly speaks, and is completely nonthreatening, so it is easy to project yourself into him.

理想化形象和空白形象经常混杂在一起。以蜘蛛侠为例。他是一个理想形象:一个强大而勇敢的超级英雄,但遮住他脸的面具让他几乎完全成为标志性形象——一张空白的脸,几乎可以是任何人。

The idealized form and the blank slate are often mixed. Consider Spider-Man, for example. He is an ideal form: a powerful and brave superhero, but the mask that covers his face makes him almost completely iconic—a blank slate that could be almost anyone.

时不时地,会出现一些花哨的系统,让你拍摄自己的照片并将其放在头像上。我听说销售这些系统的人称这是“任何游戏玩家的终极梦想”。但这些系统虽然作为新奇事物很有趣,但从长远来看却无法流行,因为人们玩游戏不是为了做自己——他们玩游戏是为了成为他们希望成为的人。

Periodically, gimmicky systems show up that let you take your own photograph and put it on your avatar. I’ve heard people selling these systems refer to this as “the ultimate dream for any gamer.” But these systems, while interesting as a novelty, never take hold in the long term because people don’t play games to be themselves—they play games to be the people they wish they could be.

第 16 章兴趣曲线中,我们引入了镜头 #72投射,作为检查玩家如何将自己投射到游戏的虚拟世界中的工具。我们还应该添加一个更具体的镜头,检查他们将自己投射到角色中的能力。

In Chapter 16: Interest Curve, we introduced Lens #72: Projection as a tool to examine how well players project themselves into the imaginary world of the game. We should also add a more specific lens, which examines how well they project themselves into their avatar.

创造引人注目的游戏角色

Creating Compelling Game Characters

游戏中的角色很重要,就像传统故事中的主角一样。但我们也不能忘记其他角色。有几十本关于剧本写作和讲故事的书可以给你很好的建议,告诉你如何制作强大、引人注目的角色。在这里,我将总结一些我认为对游戏角色开发最有用的方法。

The avatar is important in a game, just as the protagonist is important in a traditional story. But we must not forget the other characters. There are dozens of books on scriptwriting and storytelling that can give you good advice on how to make strong, compelling characters. Here I will summarize some of the methods I have found most useful for developing characters in games.

角色提示 #1:列出角色功能

Character Tip #1: List Character Functions

在创作故事的过程中,人们经常会根据故事情节的需要来创造角色。但是当游戏需要角色时该怎么办呢?在设计游戏中的角色阵容时,一个非常有用的技巧是列出这些角色需要履行的所有功能。然后列出你一直想在游戏中加入的角色,看看它们如何匹配。例如,如果你正在制作一款动作平台游戏,你的列表可能如下所示:

In the process of creating a story, one frequently invents characters as the storyline demands them. But how about when the game demands them? A very useful technique when coming up with the cast of characters in your game is to list all the functions that these characters need to fulfill. Then list the characters you had been thinking of putting in the game, and see how they match up. For example, if you are making an action platform game, your list might look like the following:

角色功能

Character Functions:

  1. 英雄:玩游戏的角色

  2. Hero: the character who plays the game

  3. 导师:提供建议和有用的物品

  4. Mentor: gives advice and useful items

  5. 助理:偶尔提供一些建议

  6. Assistant: gives occasional tips

  7. 导师:讲解如何玩游戏

  8. Tutor: explains how to play the game

  9. 最终 Boss:要与之进行最后战斗的人

  10. Final boss: someone to have the last battle against

  11. 小黄人:坏人

  12. Minions: bad guys

  13. 三位老板:要对抗的硬汉

  14. Three bosses: tough guys to battle against

  15. 人质:需要救援的人

  16. Hostage: someone to rescue

想象一下,你可能已经看到过这些人物:

Taking a peek into your imagination, you might have seen these characters:

  1. 老鼠公主:美丽,但坚强,不胡闹

  2. Princess Mouse: beautiful, but tough and no nonsense

  3. 睿智的老猫头鹰:充满智慧,但健忘

  4. Wise Old Owl: full of wisdom, but forgetful

  5. 银鹰:愤怒且复仇

  6. Silver Hawk: angry and vengeful

  7. Sammy Snake:不道德且充满讽刺幽默

  8. Sammy Snake: amoral and full of wry humor

  9. 老鼠大军:数百只长着邪恶红眼的老鼠

  10. Rat Army: hundreds of rats with evil red eyes

所以,现在你必须将角色与功能相匹配。这是一个真正发挥创造力的机会。传统的做法是让老鼠公主成为人质。但为什么不做点不同的事情呢?让她成为导师?还是英雄?甚至是最后的老板!老鼠军团看起来像是天生的奴才——但谁知道呢?也许他们只有邪恶的红眼睛,因为他们被邪恶的老鼠公主催眠了,他们实际上是人质!嗯……似乎我们没有足够的角色来填补所有八个角色——我们可以创造更多的角色,或者我们可以给一些角色多重角色。如果你的导师 Wise Old Owl 竟然是最终的 Boss,那会怎样?这将是一个讽刺性的转折,并为你节省了开发新角色的成本。也许助手和导师都是 Sammy Snake — 或者也许人质 Silver Hawk 通过从他被关押的地方发送心灵感应信息来指导你。

So, now you have to match the characters to the functions. This is an opportunity to really get creative. The traditional thing would be to make Princess Mouse the hostage. But why not do something different; make her the mentor? Or the hero? Or even the final boss! The Rat Army seem like natural minions—but who knows? Maybe they only have evil red eyes because they have been captured by the evil Princess Mouse who has hypnotized them, and they are actually the hostages! Hmm… it also seems we don’t have enough characters to fill all eight roles—we could make up more characters, or we could give some characters multiple roles. What if your mentor, Wise Old Owl, turns out to be the final boss? It would be an ironic twist and save you on the cost of developing a new character. Maybe the Assistant and Tutor are both Sammy Snake—or maybe the Silver Hawk, the hostage, mentors you by sending telepathic messages from where he is being held.

通过将角色的功能与角色的设想分开,您可以清晰地思考如何确保游戏中的角色能够完成所有必要的工作,有时还可以通过将它们组合在一起来提高效率。这种方法是一种方便的视角。

By separating the functions of the characters from your vision of the characters, you can think clearly about making sure the game has characters doing all the necessary jobs and sometimes make things more efficient by folding them together. This method serves as a handy lens.

角色提示#2:定义和使用角色特征

Character Tip #2: Define and Use Character Traits

假设我们的女主角 Sabu 和她的伙伴 Lester 之间有一些对话——简单的说明性内容,有助于设置下一个层次。比如

Let’s say we had some dialog between your heroine, Sabu, and her sidekick, Lester—simple expositional stuff, which helps set up the next level. Something like

莱斯特:萨布!

SABU:什么事?

莱斯特:有人偷了国王的王冠!

SABU:你知道这意味着什么吗?

莱斯特:不。

SABU:这意味着暗箭已经回归。我们必须阻止他!

LESTER: Sabu!

SABU: What is it?

LESTER: Someone has stolen the king’s crown!

SABU: Do you realize what this means?

LESTER: No.

SABU: It means the Dark Arrow has returned. We must stop him!

这个对话相当平淡。虽然它告诉我们情况(丢失的王冠)和反派(黑箭),但它没有告诉我们有关 Sabu 或 Lester 的任何信息。你的角色需要说和做能够定义他们是真实人物的事情。要做到这一点,你必须了解他们的性格特征。

This dialog is pretty flat. While it tells us about the situation (missing crown) and the villain (Dark Arrow), it tells us nothing about Sabu or Lester. Your characters need to say and do things that define them as real people. To do this, you must know their traits.

定义角色特征的方法有很多。有人建议创建一个“角色圣经”,列出你能想到的所有可以定义角色的特征——他们的爱和恨、他们的穿着、他们吃什么、他们在哪里长大等等。这可能是一个有用的练习。但最终,你可能希望将事情归结为一个更简单的本质:一个简短、精炼的、可以概括角色的特征列表。你想要选择那些在许多情况下都能与角色保持一致的特征,这些特征真正定义了他们作为一个人。有时这些特征可能有点矛盾,但现实生活中的人都有矛盾的特征,那么角色为什么不应该有呢?假设我们赋予 Sabu 和 Lester 这些特征:

There are many ways to define traits for your characters. Some advise creating a “character bible,” where you list out every possible thing you can think of that defines your character—their loves and hates, how they dress, what they eat, where they grew up, etc. And this can be a useful exercise. But ultimately, you will probably want to boil things down to a simpler essence: a small, distilled list of traits that encapsulate the character. You want to choose traits that are going to stay with your character through many situations that really define them as a person. Sometimes these can be a little contradictory, but real people have contradictory traits, so why shouldn’t characters? Let’s say we gave Sabu and Lester these traits:

Sabu:值得信赖、脾气暴躁、勇敢、热情的情人

莱斯特:傲慢、讽刺、精神、冲动

Sabu: trustworthy, short tempered, valiant, a fiery lover

Lester: arrogant, sarcastic, spiritual, impulsive

现在,让我们重写对话,尝试赋予它这些特征 - 最好一次赋予多个特征(还记得镜头#49优雅吗?)。

Now, let’s rewrite the dialog, trying to imbue it with these traits—preferably with more than one at a time (remember Lens #49: Elegance?).

莱斯特(冲进房间):天哪!萨布,我有消息!(冲动而又精神)

SABU:(遮住自己):你怎么敢侵犯我的隐私!(脾气暴躁)

莱斯特:随便吧。也许你不在乎国王的王冠被偷了?(傲慢而讽刺)

SABU(眼神茫然):这意味着我必须履行承诺……(值得信赖和勇敢)

莱斯特:我向毗湿奴祈祷这不是又一个旧情人的故事……(莱斯特:精神丰富且讽刺;萨布:热烈的爱人)

SABU:安静!黑暗之箭伤了我的心,也伤了我妹妹的心——我向她保证,如果他回来,我会冒着生命危险毁了他。准备好战车!(脾气暴躁,热情洋溢,值得信赖,勇敢)

LESTER (exploding into the room): By the Gods! Sabu, I have news! (impulsive and spiritual)

SABU: (covering herself): How dare you intrude on my privacy! (short tempered)

LESTER: Whatever. Maybe you don’t care that the king’s crown has been stolen? (arrogant and sarcastic)

SABU (a faraway look in her eye): This means I must do what I promised… (trustworthy and valiant)

LESTER: I pray to Vishnu this is not another story of an old flame… (Lester: spiritual and sarcastic; Sabu: fiery lover)

SABU: Silence! The Dark Arrow broke my heart, and the heart of my sister—I promised her that if he ever returned, I would risk my life to destroy him. Prepare the chariot! (short tempered, fiery lover, trustworthy, valiant)

这种处理方式不仅能使对话受益。你为角色选择的动作以及这些动作的执行方式也应该体现出这些特征。如果你的角色很狡猾,他们的跳跃动画中会显示出来吗?如果你的角色情绪低落,他们跑步时会显示出来吗?也许情绪低落的角色不应该跑步,而应该走路。列出特征列表并使用它们并没有什么神奇之处——这只是意味着你很了解你的角色。

It isn’t simply dialog that benefits from this treatment. The actions you choose for your character, and how they are carried out, should demonstrate the traits as well. If your character is sneaky, does it show in their jump animation? If your character is depressed, does it show when they run? Maybe a depressed character shouldn’t run, but only walk. There is nothing magical about having lists of traits and using them—it just means that you know your characters well.

角色提示#3:利用人际关系圈

Character Tip #3: Use the Interpersonal Circumplex

当然,你的角色不会孤单——他们会互相互动。Katherine Isbister 从社会心理学领域带入游戏设计领域的一个工具是人际关系环状图您可以使用它来可视化角色之间的关系。它有两个轴:友好度和支配度。这个复杂的图表显示了许多特征在此图表上的位置:

Your characters won’t be alone, of course—they are going to interact with each other. One tool that Katherine Isbister brought from the world of social psychology into the world of game design is the interpersonal circumplex. It is a graph you can use to visualize the relationships between characters. It has two axes: friendliness and dominance. This complex diagram shows where many traits lie on this graph:

这看起来有点让人不知所措,但它可以是一种简单的工具。假设我们想展示其他星球大战角色与汉索罗的关系。由于友好和支配是相对特征,我们总是需要让它们与特定角色相关。因此,图 20.5就是你如何绘制角色与汉索罗的关系图。

This looks kind of overwhelming, but it can be a simple tool to use. Let’s say we wanted to show how other Star Wars characters related to Han Solo. Since friendliness and dominance are relative characteristics, we always need to make them relative to a particular character. So Figure 20.5 is how you might graph out the characters relative to Han.

像这样将人物放在图表上,可以很好地直观地展示人物关系。请注意,达斯·维达、丘巴卡和 C-3PO 在图表上的表现有多么极端——这些极端正是他们有趣的原因之一。还请注意,他最常交流的人在图表上与他最亲近。左下象限没有人物这一事实告诉我们关于汉的什么信息?想想卢克或达斯·维达的图表会有什么不同。

Laying the characters out on a graph like this gives a good way to visualize character relationships. Notice how extreme Darth Vader, Chewbacca, and C-3PO are on the graph—these extremes are part of what makes them interesting. Also notice that the people he communicates with the most are the closest to him on the graph. What does the fact that there are no characters in the lower left quadrant tell us about Han? Consider how different the graphs would be for Luke, or for Darth Vader.



20.4

FIGURE

20.4

循环图不是万能工具,但它有助于思考人物关系,因为它可以引发问题。所以,让我们把它放进我们的工具箱里。

The circumplex is not a be-all or end-all tool, but it can be useful for thinking about character relationships because of the questions it can prompt. So, let’s put it in our toolbox.



20.5

FIGURE

20.5

角色提示#4:制作角色网

Character Tip #4: Make a Character Web

圆形图是一种很好的视觉方式,可以用来观察一些人物关系。但是,人物之间的关系中可能还有许多其他因素。人物关系网是一种很好的方式,可以用来探索人物对彼此的感觉以及原因。这个想法很简单:要分析一个人物,就写下这个人物对其他所有人物的看法。以下是阿奇漫画世界中的一个例子:

The circumplex is a nice visual way to see some character relationships. But there can be many other factors in the relationships between your characters. The character web is a good way to explore how the characters feel about each other and why. The idea is simple: To analyze a character, write down what that character thinks of all the other characters. Here’s an example from the world of Archie comics:

阿奇
  • 维罗妮卡:阿奇被她的优雅和美貌所吸引。虽然她很富有,但阿奇并不太在乎这些。

  • Veronica: Archie is lured by her elegance and beauty. Though she is rich, Archie doesn’t care much about that.

  • 贝蒂:阿奇的真爱,但她的不安全感不断向他发出混乱的信号,所以他并没有尽其所能地追求她。

  • Betty: Archie’s true love, but her insecurity constantly gives him mixed signals, so he doesn’t pursue her as forcefully as he might.

  • 雷吉:阿奇不应该信任雷吉,但他经常信任他,因为阿奇总是努力做个好人,而阿奇有点容易上当受骗。

  • Reggie: Archie shouldn’t trust Reggie, but he often does, because Archie always tries to be a nice guy and Archie is kind of gullible.

  • Jughead:Archie 最好的朋友。他们的共同点是,他们都是弱势群体。

  • Jughead: Archie’s best friend. What they have in common is that they are both underdogs.

维罗妮卡
  • 阿奇:维罗妮卡觉得阿奇很有魅力,但有时她想和他约会是为了让贝蒂感到沮丧,也因为她在他身边总能感觉到自己的优越感。

  • Archie: Veronica finds Archie attractive, but sometimes she seeks to date him to frustrate Betty and because she can always feel superior around him.

  • 贝蒂:维罗妮卡信任贝蒂,因为她们小时候就是朋友。维罗妮卡喜欢自己总能在财富和阶级方面比贝蒂优越,但贝蒂比维罗妮卡更优秀,这让维罗妮卡很失望。

  • Betty: Veronica trusts Betty as a friend because they were friends as little girls. Veronica likes how she can always feel superior to Betty in terms of wealth and class, but it really frustrates Veronica that Betty is a better person.

  • 雷吉:雷吉是个富有魅力的小丑,他欣赏财富,但维罗妮卡对雷吉并不真正尊重或爱她感到沮丧。

  • Reggie: Reggie is an attractive buffoon who appreciates wealth, but Veronica gets frustrated that Reggie doesn’t really respect or love her.

  • Jughead:令人作呕的怪物——维罗妮卡无法理解阿奇为何与他交朋友。维罗妮卡经常用食物贿赂他,以得到她想要的东西。

  • Jughead: A nauseating freak—Veronica can’t understand why Archie is friends with him. Veronica often bribes him with food to get what she wants.

贝蒂
  • 阿奇:她的真爱。但她羞于告诉他她的真实感受,因为贝蒂缺乏自信。

  • Archie: Her true love. She is shy, though, about telling him how she really feels, because Betty has low self-esteem.

  • 维罗妮卡:贝蒂最好的朋友。她有时很刻薄,而且太贪财了,但朋友永远是朋友,所以贝蒂和维罗妮卡在一起。

  • Veronica: Betty’s BFF. She can be mean sometimes, and she is too money crazy, but friends are friends forever, so Betty stays with Veronica.

  • 雷吉:贝蒂被他的财富和在课堂上的炫耀吓到了。她觉得自己应该喜欢他,但内心深处却对他很反感。

  • Reggie: Betty is intimidated by his wealth and showy attempts at class. She feels like she is supposed to like him, but secretly she is repelled by him.

  • Jughead:Betty 认为他很可爱、有趣,并且很高兴他能成为她真爱的如此好的朋友。

  • Jughead: Betty thinks he’s cute and funny and glad that he’s such a good friend to her true love.

雷吉
  • 阿奇:雷吉的劲敌。雷吉无法想象别人会怎么看待这样一个愚蠢的好人。雷吉偶尔会羡慕阿奇的受欢迎程度,但他总认为自己能找到一种狡猾的方法来胜过阿奇。

  • Archie: Reggie’s archrival. Reggie can’t imagine what anyone sees in such a dopey nice guy. Occasionally, Reggie envies Archie’s popularity, but he always thinks he can find a tricky way to outdo Archie.

  • 维罗妮卡:雷吉发现她很有魅力,而且很富有——他喜欢她财富带来的力量。

  • Veronica: Reggie finds her attractive and rich—he likes the power of her wealth.

  • 贝蒂:雷吉觉得她很有魅力,尽管她的自卑令人反感,但为了赢得她的芳心,他愿意展现自己比阿奇更优秀。

  • Betty: Reggie finds her attractive, and though her low self-esteem is a turnoff, to be able to win her, he would show his superiority over Archie.

  • Jughead:雷吉认为他是一个彻底的失败者,活该被欺负,尤其是因为他和阿奇是朋友。

  • Jughead: Reggie sees him as a total loser who deserves to be bullied, especially since he is friends with Archie.

Jughead
  • 阿奇(Archie): Jughead 最好的朋友,也是唯一理解和欣赏 Jughead 对食物的热爱的人。

  • Archie: Jughead’s best friend, and the only one who understands and appreciates Jughead’s love of food.

  • 维罗妮卡:阿奇喜欢的坏女孩。

  • Veronica: The mean girl that Archie likes.

  • 贝蒂:阿奇喜欢的那个好女孩。

  • Betty: The nice girl that Archie likes.

  • 雷吉:一个恶霸。

  • Reggie: A bully.

您会发现这需要一点时间,但这是值得的,因为它会引发您可能从未想过的人物互动问题。这是赋予您的人物更多深度的非常方便的镜头。

You can see that this takes a little time, but it can be well worth the effort because of the questions it raises about character interactions you might not have thought about. It’s a very handy lens for giving your characters more depth.

《迷失》《生活大爆炸》等电视剧的成功源于对人物关系网的深入探索。在游戏中,很少有人能很好地探索这一点,因此这是一个值得追求的机会。

The success of television shows like Lost and The Big Bang Theory comes from a deep exploration of the character web. It is rare to see it explored well in games, which makes it an opportunity worth pursuing.

角色提示#5:使用状态

Character Tip #5: Use Status

到目前为止,我们看到的大多数角色技巧都来自作家。但还有另一种职业,他们同样懂得如何创造引人入胜的角色,甚至比他们懂得更多——演员。许多人将互动式叙事的不可预测性与即兴表演的不可预测性相提并论;事实上,即兴演员的技巧对游戏设计师非常有用。这些技巧很多,在几本书中都有详细描述,但对我来说,有一种技巧比其他技巧更突出。它实际上不是一种技巧,而是一种镜头,Keith Johnstone 在他的经典著作《即兴表演》中对此进行了完美的描述——即地位的镜头。

Most of the character tips we’ve seen so far come from writers. But there is another profession that knows just as much about creating compelling characters, if not more—actors. Many people have drawn parallels between the unpredictable nature of interactive storytelling and the unpredictable nature of improvisational theater; indeed, the techniques of the improvisational actor can prove quite useful to game designers. These techniques are many and are well described in several books, but there is one, for me, that stands out above all others. It is really not so much a technique, but a lens described impeccably well by Keith Johnstone in his classic book Impro—it is the Lens of Status.

每当人们见面或互动时,总有一场隐秘的谈判在不断发生。我们大多没有意识到这一点,因为它在我们说话之前就存在了。这是我们的地位谈判;也就是说,谁是当前互动的主导者?地位与你是谁无关;地位与你做的事情有关。约翰斯通用这段对话很好地说明了这一点:

Whenever people meet or interact, there is a hidden negotiation that constantly takes place. We are mostly not conscious of it, since it predates our ability to speak. It is our negotiation of status; that is, who is in charge of the current interaction? Status is not a matter of who you are; status is something you do. Johnstone illustrates this quite well with this bit of dialog:

流浪汉:“咦!你要去哪儿?”

公爵夫人:抱歉,我没听清楚……

流浪汉:你又聋又瞎吗?

TRAMP: ‘Ere! Where are you going?

DUCHESS: I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch…

TRAMP: Are you deaf as well as blind?

你可能认为流浪汉的地位很低,但他们却表现出很高的地位。无论两人或多人在任何场合互动,无论是朋友还是敌人、合作者还是竞争对手、主人还是仆人,都会发生地位谈判。我们几乎完全无意识地通过姿势、语气、眼神接触和其他几十种细节行为来做到这一点。令人惊讶的是,这些行为在所有文化中都如此一致。

The tramp, who you might expect to be very low status, is taking on an attitude of very high status. Any time two or more people interact in any setting—whether friends or enemies, collaborators or competitors, masters or servants—a negotiation of status takes place. We do this almost entirely subconsciously with posture, tone of voice, eye contact, and dozens of other detailed behaviors. What is surprising is how consistent these behaviors are across all cultures.

  • 典型的低地位行为包括坐立不安、避免目光接触、触摸自己的脸、以及普遍感到紧张。

  • Typical low-status behaviors include fidgeting, avoiding eye contact, touching one’s own face, and generally being tense.

  • 典型的高地位行为包括放松和控制、进行强烈的目光接触,以及奇怪的是,说话时不动头。

  • Typical high-status behaviors include being relaxed and in control, making strong eye contact, and, weirdly, not moving your head while you speak.

一种典型的即兴表演练习是将演员分成两组,然后让他们混在一起——第一组(地位低下)的人与其他人进行短暂的目光接触,然后移开视线,而第二组(地位高下)的人与其他人进行目光接触并保持目光接触。大多数尝试过这种练习的演员很快意识到这不仅仅是在假装——地位低下组的演员很快发现他们感到自卑,并开始无意识地表现出其他地位低下的特征。地位高组的演员开始感到优越,并表现出地位高下的特征。即使你独自一人,试着说话时完全不动头,看看这让你有什么感觉——或者试试相反的做法——说话时经常转动头,你很快就会明白。

A typical improv exercise is to split the group of actors into two groups, who then intermingle—individuals in the first group (low status) make brief eye contact, then look away, while the second group (high status) makes and holds eye contact with others. Most actors who try this exercise quickly realize that this isn’t just playing pretend—the actors in the low-status group quickly find that they feel inferior and start unconsciously taking on other low-status characteristics. The actors in the high-status group start to feel superior and take on high-status characteristics. Even if you are by yourself, try talking without moving your head at all, and see how it makes you feel—or try the opposite—talking while turning your head frequently, and you will quickly get the idea.

地位是相对的,对个人而言不是绝对的。达斯·维达在与莱娅公主打交道时会表现出高地位的行为,但在与皇帝打交道时,他却表现出低地位的行为。

Status is a relative thing, not absolute to an individual. Darth Vader takes on high-status behavior when he deals with Princess Leia, but he takes on low status when he deals with the Emperor.

地位可以用令人惊讶的方式传达——例如,慢动作可以传达高地位,正如我们在《无敌金刚》、《黑客帝国》和无数洗发水广告中看到的那样。角色占据空间的方式也非常能说明地位。地位低的角色会去他们不太可能遇到别人或被注意到的地方。地位高的角色则在房间里最重要的地方。

Status can be conveyed in surprising ways—slow motion, for example, gives high status, as we’ve seen in The Six Million Dollar Man, The Matrix, and countless shampoo commercials. The way characters occupy space is also very telling of status. Low-status characters go to places where they are less likely to encounter others or be noticed. High-status characters are in the most important place in the room.

地位就像一种秘密语言,我们熟知它,却不知道自己在说它。它潜意识很强,问题是,当我们创造虚拟角色时,我们不会想到要赋予他们这些行为,因为我们通常不知道自己在做这些事情。但如果你确实赋予他们这些行为当你跟踪你的角色时,你很快就会发现他们似乎彼此意识到了对方的存在,而大多数电子游戏角色却没有这样做。

Status is like a secret language that we all know so well we don’t know we’re speaking it. The problem with it being so subconscious is that when we create artificial characters, it doesn’t occur to us to give them these behaviors, because generally we aren’t aware that we do these things. But if you do give these behaviors to your characters, you will quickly find that they seem aware of each other in a way that most videogame characters are not.

游戏Munch's Oddysee中有很多角色状态互动的例子。在游戏中,你控制两个不同的角色,其中一个是奴隶,另一个被束缚在轮椅上(地位低下)。在整个游戏过程中,你会面对傲慢(地位高)的敌人,并获得奴性(地位低下)追随者的帮助。所有这些之间的互动都很有趣,而且很多喜剧效果都来自意想不到的地位逆转,例如追随者对 Munch 或敌人大发雷霆。这款游戏中的角色表现出对彼此存在的认识,虽然很粗鲁,但比许多其他游戏要高出一筹。

The game Munch’s Oddysee has great examples of character status interactions. In it, you control two different characters, one of whom is a slave and the other is bound to a wheelchair (low status). Throughout the game, you face arrogant (high-status) enemies and get help from slavish (low-status) followers. The interactions between all these are quite interesting to see, and a great deal of comedy comes from unexpected status reversals, such as the followers mouthing off at Munch or at the enemies. The characters in this game show an awareness of each other’s presence that, while crude, is a step above many other games.

地位是互动娱乐领域尚未探索的领域。布伦达·哈格尔是第一个向我介绍地位概念的人,她是一位出色的即兴演员,也是卡内基梅隆大学娱乐技术中心的研究员。她和她的学生在创造人工智能角色方面做了一些令人着迷的工作,这些角色能够意识到自己的地位和其他角色的地位,并自动采取适当的姿势、动作和个人空间。目前,大多数视频游戏角色无论周围是谁,行为都是一样的。下一代互动游戏角色似乎会显得更加生动,因为他们意识到了地位。

Status is a largely unexplored area in interactive entertainment. Brenda Harger, who first introduced me to the concept of status, is an excellent improv actress and a researcher at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. She and her students have done some fascinating work on creating artificially intelligent characters that are aware of their status and of the status of other characters and automatically adopt appropriate postures, actions, and personal space. Right now, most videogame characters behave the same way no matter who is around. It seems likely that the next generation of interactive game characters will seem more alive because they are aware of status.

第 16 章兴趣曲线中,我们讨论了那些发生巨大变化的重要事物本身就很有趣。地位就是其中一件重要的事情。在争论中,人们都在争夺最高地位(要么提高自己的地位,要么降低对手的地位),这种地位的拉锯战让争论变得有趣。

In Chapter 16: Interest Curve, we talked about how important things that change dramatically are inherently interesting. Status is one of those important things. During arguments, people are vying to have the highest status (either by raising their own or lowering the status of their opponent), and this seesaw of status is what makes arguments interesting.

不过,地位不仅仅与对话有关——它还与动作、眼神接触、领地以及角色的行为有关。这是一种看待世界的方式,所以让我们把它放在我们的工具箱里。

Status isn’t just about dialog, though—it is also about movement, eye contact, territory, and what characters do. It is a way of looking at the world, so let’s put it in our toolbox.

当然,了解状态不仅能让你了解如何塑造逼真的角色,还能帮助你理解和控制现实生活中的情况,比如设计会议和客户谈判,但我们将在后面的章节中讨论这些内容。

Of course, having an understanding of status does more than give you insights into how to make realistic characters—it helps you understand and control real-life situations, like design meetings and client negotiations, but we’ll discuss those in later chapters.

角色提示#6:利用声音的力量

Character Tip #6: Use the Power of the Voice

人类的声音非常强大,它可以在深层的潜意识层面影响我们。这就是为什么有声电影将电影从一种新奇事物提升为二十世纪的主流艺术形式。直到过去几年,技术才允许电子游戏认真使用配音。即使是现在,与电影中强大的表演相比,游戏中的配音似乎还很原始。

The human voice is an incredibly powerful thing, which can affect us at a deep subconscious level. This is why talking pictures elevated the cinema from a novelty to the dominant art form of the twentieth century. It is only in the past few years that technology has permitted videogames to make serious use of voice acting. Even now, the voice acting in games seems primitive compared to the powerful performances in films.

部分原因是游戏开发者在与配音演员合作时往往缺乏经验。指导配音演员是一门微妙的艺术,需要一定的技巧和多年的练习才能做好。但游戏配音效果差的另一个原因是我们把这个过程倒着来。在动画电影中,先写好剧本,然后请配音演员来录制。在录制过程中,他们会更改台词,进行即兴创作,并将好的台词融入剧本中。录音完成后,设计角色(通常会融入演员的面部特征),然后开始制作动画。在电子游戏中,我们的做法则相反——通常先设计和塑造角色;然后编写剧本,通常制作基本的动画;最后才添加配音。这削弱了配音演员的力量,他们现在只是试图模仿他们看到的东西,而不是正确地表达他们真正感觉到的角色会如何行动和举止。配音演员在创作过程中变得边缘化,而不是中心化,声音的力量被削弱了。

Partly, this is true because game developers are often inexperienced when working with voice talent. Directing a voice actor is a delicate art that takes a certain knack and years of practice to do well. But there is another reason for weak voice acting in games—it is because we do the process backwards. In animated films, a script is written first, and then voice actors are brought in to record it. As they do, lines are changed, improvisations are made, and the good ones are incorporated into the script. Once the recordings are in place, the characters get designed (often incorporating facial features of the actors), and animation commences. In videogames, we do this the other way—the characters are often designed and modeled first; then the script is written, often basic animations are created; and then the voice acting is added last. This diminishes the power of the voice actor, who is now just trying to imitate what they see, instead of rightly expressing how they truly feel their character would act and behave. The voice actor becomes peripheral to the creative process, not central, and the power of voice is weakened.

为什么我们要反过来做呢?因为游戏开发过程非常不稳定,围绕角色的声音来创作角色的成本非常高,因为剧本在整个过程中都在不断变化。希望随着时间的推移,我们能够开发出一些技术,让配音演员成为游戏角色设计的核心,并重新获得声音的力量。顽皮狗是一家认真对待这一理念的公司——《神秘海域》系列和《最后生还者》都涉及了数十次录音会议,这些会议贯穿了整个项目,与配音演员的反复合作似乎对这些游戏的情感力量产生了真正的影响。

Why do we do this backwards? Because the process of game development is so volatile, it is expensive to create characters around their voices, since the script continues to change throughout the entire process. Hopefully, with time, we will develop techniques that will allow voice actors to become more central to game character design and reclaim the power of voice. Naughty Dog is one company that takes this notion seriously—both the Uncharted series and The Last of Us involved dozens of recording sessions that spanned the length of the projects, and the iterative work with the voice actors seems to have made a real difference in the emotional power of these games.

角色提示#7:利用面部的力量

Character Tip #7: Use the Power of the Face

我们大脑的很大一部分被专门用于处理面部表情的硬件所占据。我们的面部是整个动物界中最复杂、最富有表现力的。例如,请注意我们的眼白——其他动物没有可见的眼白。看来我们进化出眼白是为了交流。我们也是唯一会脸红的动物,也是唯一会哭的动物。

A huge percentage of our brains is taken up with custom hardware for processing facial expression. We have the most complex and expressive faces in the entire animal kingdom. Notice, for example, our eye whites—other animals do not have visible eye whites. It would appear we evolved them as a method of communication. We are also the only animal that blushes and the only animal that cries.

尽管如此,很少有电子游戏对面部动画给予应有的重视。游戏设计师过于关注角色的动作,而很少考虑角色的情绪。如果一款游戏确实有有意义的面部动画(如《塞尔达传说:风之杖》),它往往会引起很多关注。早期 3D 聊天室 OnLive Traveler 的设计师对角色的多边形预算非常严格。在构建和测试原型时,他们每次都会问用户:“角色是否需要更多细节?”而每次答案都是“是的——在脸上。”经过五六轮这样的操作后,身体逐渐消失,角色只剩下怪异的漂浮头颅——但这正是用户所喜欢的,因为这是一项关于自我表达的活动,而面部是现存最具表现力的工具。

Despite all these, few videogames give facial animation the attention it deserves. Game designers are so focused on the actions of the characters that they give little thought to their emotions. When a game does have meaningful facial animation (such as Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker), it often garners a lot of attention. The designers of OnLive Traveler, an early 3D chat room, had very strict polygon budgets for their characters. As they built and tested prototypes, they would ask their users each time: “Do the characters need more details?” And every time, the answer would come back, “Yes— in the face.” After five or six rounds of this, the bodies dwindled away to nothing, leaving the characters as eerie floating heads—but this was what the users preferred, since this was an activity about self-expression, and faces are the most expressive tool that exists.

面部动画并不需要花费太多的钱——简单的眉毛或眼睛形状动画就能产生巨大的效果。但你必须要有一个玩家可见的角色脸。头像脸通常对玩家不可见。《毁灭战士》的设计师找到了一种改变这种情况的方法,即在屏幕底部放置一张头像脸的小图片。由于我们在周边视觉中更容易注意到面部表情,而不是辨别数字,他们明智地让面部表情与健康指标相对应,这样玩家就可以知道他们受伤的程度,而无需将视线从敌人身上移开。

Facial animation doesn’t have to be expensive—you can get tremendous power out of simple animated eyebrows or eye shapes. But you do have to have a character face that will be visible to the player. Avatar faces generally are not visible to the player. The designers of Doom found a way to change that by putting a small picture of the avatar’s face on the bottom of the screen. Since we can notice facial expression in our peripheral vision more easily than we can discern numbers, they wisely made the facial expression correspond to the health meter, so that players got a sense of how injured they were without having to take their eyes off of their enemies.

最重要的是,你应该关注角色的眼睛。人们说眼睛是心灵的窗户,但电子游戏角色的眼睛往往呆滞无神。如果你能让角色的眼睛栩栩如生,整个角色都会活过来。想让你的反派看起来很邪恶吗?专注于眼睛。想让你的僵尸看起来很恐怖吗?给他一双恐怖的眼睛。想让你的企鹅看起来很可爱吗?专注于可爱的眼睛。关于眼睛的另一个有趣的事实是——我们用它们来判断谁是亲戚。看看例如, 《辛普森一家》中的卡通眼睛——每个家庭都有一双眼睛。眼睛里藏着许多秘密。给予它们适当的关注,你的角色就会活灵活现地回报你。

Most of all, you should focus on your characters’ eyes. It is said that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but so often, videogame characters have dull, dead eyes. If you can bring the eyes of your character to life, the whole character will come alive. Want your villain to seem evil? Focus on the eyes. Want your zombie to seem creepy? Give him creepy eyes. Want your penguin to seem cute? Focus on cute eyes. Another interesting fact about eyes—we use them to tell who is related. Look at the cartoon eyes in The Simpsons, for example—each family has one set of eyes. Eyes hold many secrets. Give them proper attention, and your characters will thank you by coming to life.



20.6

FIGURE

20.6

角色提示#8:强有力的故事改变角色

Character Tip #8: Powerful Stories Transform Characters

人是不会改变的,只是显露出来了。

—安妮·恩莱特

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

—Anne Enright

伟大故事的一个显著特征是其角色的变化。电子游戏设计师很少考虑这一点,这对他们不利。人们倾向于将游戏角色视为固定类型——反派永远是反派,英雄生来就是英雄。这使得故事叙述非常无聊。一些游戏,如《神鬼寓言》《星球大战:旧共和国武士》,之所以出名,是因为它们做了几乎每一部成功的电影或书籍都会做的事情——让事件随着时间的推移改变主角。

One distinguishing feature of great stories is how their characters change. Video game designers seldom consider this, to their detriment. There is a tendency to treat game characters as fixed types—the villain is always the villain, the hero was born a hero. This makes for very boring storytelling. A few games, such as Fable and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, became famous because of the fact that they do what nearly every successful movie or book does—let events change the main character over time.

当然,并不是每个游戏中的主角都能发生有意义的角色变化。但也许游戏中的其他角色,比如配角或反派,可以发生角色变化。要想象游戏中角色变化的可能性,可以制作一个角色转变图表,左侧是角色,顶部是故事的不同部分。然后,标记出角色发生某种变化的地方。例如,考虑一下灰姑娘故事中的变化:

It is certainly true that meaningful character change is not possible for the main character in every game. But perhaps character change can happen to other characters in the game such as the sidekick or the villain. A great way to visualize the potential for character change in your game is to make a character transformation chart, with characters on the left side and the different sections of your story along the top. Then, mark down the places where a character undergoes some kind of change. For example, consider the changes in the story of Cinderella:

通过观察每个角色的演变过程,而不仅仅是故事情节,我们可以获得独特的视角,从而更好地理解角色。有些转变是暂时的、微小的,而另一些转变则是巨大的、永久的。通过考虑角色应该如何改变并充分利用这一点,你的游戏将讲述一个比角色在故事中不受任何影响更强大的故事。角色转变的视角是我们最终的角色镜头。

By looking at each character over time, instead of just the story thread, we get a unique perspective that helps us to better understand our characters. Some transformations are temporary and small, others are great and permanent. By considering how your characters should change and making the most of that, your game will tell a far more powerful story than if they pass through the story untouched by it. This perspective of character transformation is our final character lens.

角色提示#9:让你的角色给我们带来惊喜

Character Tip #9: Let Your Characters Surprise Us

在 F. Scott Fitzgerald 的小说《夜色温柔》中,罗斯玛丽和迪克有一段对话,这段对话对于我们这些故事讲述者来说非常重要。对话以演员罗斯玛丽问了一个简单的问题开始:

In the novel Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is a conversation between Rosemary and Dick, which is terribly important to us as storytellers. It begins with Rosemary, the actress, asking a simple question:

“我想问一下,如果你看过我最近的照片的话,你觉得它们怎么样。”

“这需要几分钟才能告诉你,”迪克说。“假设妮可告诉你兰尼尔病了。你在生活中会做什么?其他人会做什么?他们行动——面部表情、声音、言语——面部表情表示悲伤,声音表示震惊,言语表示同情。”

“是的我明白。”

“但在剧院里,情况并非如此。在剧院里,所有最好的女喜剧演员都通过模仿正确的情感反应——恐惧、爱和同情——建立了自己的声誉。”

“我明白了。”但她并没有完全明白。

“女演员的危险在于回应。再假设有人告诉你,‘你的爱人死了。’在生活中,你可能会崩溃。但在舞台上,你试图娱乐观众——观众可以自己做出‘回应’。首先,女演员要遵循台词,然后她必须让观众的注意力重新回到自己身上,远离被谋杀的中国人或任何其他事情。所以她必须做一些出乎意料的事情。如果观众认为角色很强硬,她就会对他们软弱——如果他们认为她很软弱,她就会变得强硬。你要完全脱离角色——你明白吗?”

“我不太清楚,”罗斯玛丽承认道。“你指的是什么不符合你的性格?”

“你会做出出人意料的事情,直到你将观众的注意力从客观事实转移到你自己身上。然后你再次进入角色。”

“I wanted to ask you what you thought of my latest pictures— if you saw them.”

“It’ll take a few minutes to tell you,” Dick said. “Let’s suppose that Nicole says to you that Lanier is ill. What do you do in life? What does anyone do? They ACT— face, voice, words— the face shows sorrow, the voice shows shock, the words show sympathy.”

“Yes— I understand.”

“But in the theatre, No. In the theatre all the best comediennes have built up their reputations by burlesquing the correct emotional responses— fear and love and sympathy.”

“I see.” Yet she did not quite see.

“The danger to an actress is in responding. Again, let’s suppose that somebody told you, ‘Your lover is dead.’ In life you’d probably go to pieces. But on the stage you’re trying to entertain—the audience can do the ‘responding’ for themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has to get the audience’s attention back on herself, away from the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. So she must do something unexpected. If the audience thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them—if they think she’s soft she goes hard. You go all OUT of character—you understand?”

“I don’t quite,” admitted Rosemary. “How do you mean out of character?”

“You do the unexpected thing until you’ve manoeuvred the audience back from the objective fact to yourself. THEN you slide into character again.”

这条建议似乎与我们所知道的关于讲故事和表演的一切完全相反。我们期望角色的行为真实可信。但在这里,菲茨杰拉德告诉我们,在一个好故事中,角色的行为与观众的期望相反。这是完全正确的。当你知道如何寻找它时,你随处可见。它存在于喜剧、戏剧、经典作品中,无处不在。热门电视剧《绝命毒师》几乎就是建立在这个原则之上的。这是惊喜镜头的另一种用途。当角色的情绪反应与我们预期的不一样时,我们会注意。当然,乐趣就是惊喜带来的快乐,对吧?如果你想让玩家享受玩你的角色的乐趣,那么设计每个角色的方式就像设计玩具一样。寻找让你的角色给玩家带来惊喜的方法,玩家就会关注你角色的每句话和每个动作。

This advice seems completely contrary to everything we know about storytelling and acting. We expect characters to behave realistically and believably. But here, Fitzgerald is telling us that in a good story, the characters do the opposite of what the audience expects. And it is totally true. When you know to look for it, you can see it everywhere. It’s in comedies, dramas, the classics, everywhere. The popular television show Breaking Bad was practically founded on this principle. It’s yet another use for The Lens of Surprise. When characters have an emotional reaction that isn’t what we expect, we pay attention. And of course, fun is just pleasure with surprises, right? If you want players to enjoy playing with your characters, design each one the same way you would design a toy. Look for ways to let your characters surprise your players, and the players will hang on your characters’ every word and action.

角色提示#10:避免恐怖谷效应

Character Tip #10: Avoid the Uncanny Valley

日本机器人专家 Masahiro Mori 注意到了人类对机器人和其他人造角色的反应。如果你思考一下人们如何产生同理心,你可能会注意到,某样东西越接近人类,人们就越能产生同理心。你甚至可以把它画成一张图表:

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noted something interesting about human response to robots and other artificial characters. If you think about how people empathize, you might notice that the closer something is to seeming human, the more they can empathize with it. You might even lay this out on a graph like:



20.7

FIGURE

20.7

这很有道理。某物越像人,我们就越能产生同理心。但 Mori 注意到一个有趣的例外,他在研究试图模仿人类的机器人时发现——一旦它们开始变得太像人类,比如从金属脸(想想 C-3PO)变成人造皮肤,人们就会突然觉得它们令人厌恶。这使得图表看起来像图 20.8

And this makes perfect sense. The more something is like a person, the more empathy we give it. But Mori noted an interesting exception, as he worked on robots that tried to mimic humans—as soon as they started to get too human, perhaps moving from a metal face (think C-3PO) to one with artificial skin, people suddenly found them repulsive. It made the graph look like Figure 20.8.

森将曲线的这种意外下降称为“恐怖谷”。这种不安感的起因可能是,当我们看到与人几乎一样的东西时,我们的大脑会将它们识别为“病人”,可能对周围造成危险。僵尸是生活在恐怖谷底部的令人毛骨悚然的事物的典型例子。

Mori referred to this surprising dip in the curve as “the uncanny valley.” The cause of this uneasy feeling may be that when we see things that almost look like people, our brains register them as “diseased people” who might be dangerous to be around. Zombies are a canonical example of the creepy things that live at the bottom of the uncanny valley.



20.8

FIGURE

20.8

恐怖谷效应在电子游戏和动画中随处可见。《最终幻想》《极地特快》等电影的每一帧画面看起来都十分美丽自然——如果你只看其中一帧的话。但当电影处于运动状态时,电脑生成的人类会让人觉得有些恐怖——不知何故,他们无法正常移动——他们离山谷太近,然后掉进去了。将这些角色与皮克斯电影中的卡通人物(鱼、玩具、汽车、机器人)进行对比,后者很容易引起共鸣,因为他们一直呆在山谷的左侧,也就是那只小狗所在的地方。

The uncanny valley shows up in videogames and animation all the time. Every frame of films such as Final Fantasy and The Polar Express looks gorgeous and natural—when you just look at one frame. But when the films are in motion, there is something about the computer-generated humans that many people find creepy—somehow, they don’t move quite right—they got too close to the valley and fell in. Contrast those characters to the cartoony characters (fish, toys, cars, robots) in Pixar films that have no problem generating empathy, because they stay to the left side of the valley, where that puppy dog is.

电子游戏角色很容易遇到同样的问题——尤其是在那些试图模仿现实的游戏中。也许有一天,电子游戏角色会变得如此人性化,以至于他们可以安全地存在于山谷的右侧,但在此之前,请谨慎行事——路还很长。

Videogame characters can easily have the same problems—especially in games that try to mimic reality. The day may come where videogame characters are so human looking that they can safely exist on the right side of the valley, but until then, use caution—it’s a long way down.

人物无疑使世界变得更加有趣,但要使它成为一个世界,它还需要其他东西——一个存在的空间。

Characters definitely make a world more interesting, but for it to be a world at all, it needs something else—a space to exist.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 凯瑟琳·伊斯比斯特 (Katherine Isbister) 著的《更好的电子游戏角色设计》。这本书巧妙地将社会心理学世界与电子游戏世界联系起来,介绍了许多让角色栩栩如生的实用工具和技术。

  • Better Videogame Characters by Design by Katherine Isbister. This book masterfully bridges the world of social psychology and the world of videogames, presenting many practical tools and techniques for bringing your characters to life.

  • 即兴表演,基思·约翰斯通 (Keith Johnstone) 著。如果你认为即兴表演就是一些愚蠢的笑话,那么这本书会让你明白。它实际上是关于如何在实时中创造有趣的场景,或者换句话说,游戏设计。

  • Impro by Keith Johnstone. If you think improvisational acting is all about silly jokes, this book will straighten you out. It is really about how to create interesting situations in real time, or, in other words, game design.

  • 斯科特·麦克劳德 (Scott McCloud) 著《理解漫画》。这本书是无与伦比的杰作。如果您还没有读过,请立即阅读。

  • Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. This book is a masterpiece without parallel. If you haven’t read it, do so immediately.

第二十 一章

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

世界包含空间

Worlds Contain Spaces



21.1

FIGURE

21.1

等一下——我们不是在第 12 章机制中讨论过空间的概念吗?既是也不是。我们讨论了功能空间的概念——但功能空间只是游戏空间的骨架。在本章中,我们将研究玩家实际体验的具体空间。

Wait a minute—didn’t we cover the idea of space in Chapter 12: Mechanics? Yes and no. We discussed the idea of functional space—but functional space is only the skeleton of the game space. In this chapter, we will examine the fleshed-out space the player actually experiences.

建筑的目的

The Purpose of Architecture

是的,如果您不介意下雨时在前院露营,那就建一座弗兰克·劳埃德房屋吧。

—艾琳·巴恩斯达尔

Yes, build a Frank Lloyd house if you don’t mind camping in the front yard when it rains.

—Aline Barnsdall

当您听到“建筑”一词时,您会想到什么?大多数人会想到宏伟的建筑,尤其是具有不同寻常形状的现代建筑。人们有时似乎认为建筑师的主要工作是塑造建筑的外形,而欣赏好的建筑意味着欣赏这些建筑外形,就像人们欣赏博物馆里的雕塑一样。

What do you think of when you hear the word “architecture”? Most people think of grand buildings, particularly modern buildings with unusual shapes. People sometimes seem to think that the primary job of the architect is to sculpt the outer shape of a building, and that appreciation of good architecture means enjoying these building shapes like one might enjoy sculptures in a museum.

虽然建筑的外形是建筑的一个方面,但它与建筑的主要目的关系不大。

And while the outer shape of a structure is one aspect of architecture, it has little to do with the primary purpose of architecture.

建筑的首要目的是控制一个人的体验。

The primary purpose of architecture is to control a person’s experience.

如果我们想要拥有的所有体验都能在大自然中轻易找到,那么建筑就毫无意义了。但这些体验并不总是存在的,因此建筑师设计一些东西来帮助我们获得我们想要的体验。我们想要体验阴凉和干燥,所以我们搭起庇护所。我们想要体验安全和保障,所以我们建造墙壁。我们建造房屋、学校、商场、教堂、办公室、保龄球馆、酒店和博物馆,不是因为我们想看这些建筑,而是因为这些建筑能让我们拥有想要拥有的体验。当我们说其中一栋建筑“设计精良”时,我们并不是在谈论它的外观。我们谈论的是它如何很好地创造了我们在里面想要拥有的那种体验。

If all the experiences we wanted to have were to be found easily in nature, there would be no point to architecture. But those experiences aren’t always there, so architects design things to help us have the experiences we desire. We want to experience shade and dryness, so we put up shelters. We want to experience safety and security, so we build walls. We build houses, schools, malls, churches, offices, bowling alleys, hotels, and museums not because we want to look at those buildings, but because there are experiences we want to have that these buildings make possible. And when we say one of these buildings is “well designed,” we aren’t talking about what it looks like on the outside. What we are talking about is how well it creates the kind of experience we want to have when we are inside.

因此,建筑师和游戏设计师是近亲。两者都设计了人们必须进入才能使用的结构。建筑师和游戏设计师都不能直接创造体验——相反,两者都必须依靠间接控制来引导人们获得正确的体验。最重要的是,两者都创造了除了产生让人们快乐的体验之外没有任何意义的结构。

For this reason, architects and game designers are close cousins. Both create structures that people must enter in order to use. Neither architects nor game designers can create experiences directly—instead, both must rely on the use of indirect control to guide people into having the right kind of experience. And most importantly, both create structures that have no point other than to engender experiences that make people happy.

组织你的游戏空间

Organizing Your Game Space

游戏设计师和建筑师之间也有更明显的联系——两者都必须创造空间。虽然游戏设计师可以学到很多关于创造有意义和强大的空间不同于建筑师,游戏设计师绝不必遵循建筑的所有规则,因为他们创造的空间不是由砖块和灰泥制成的,而是完全虚拟的结构。虽然这听起来像是一种美妙的自由(确实如此),但它也可能是一种负担。没有物理限制意味着几乎一切皆有可能——如果一切皆有可能,你从哪里开始呢?

There is a more obvious connection between game designers and architects as well—both have to create spaces. And while game designers can learn a lot about creating meaningful and powerful spaces from architects, by no means do game designers have to follow every rule of architecture, since the spaces they create are not made of bricks and mortar, but are completely virtual structures. And while this sounds like a wonderful freedom (it is), it can also be a burden. The lack of physical constraints means almost anything is possible—and if anything is possible, where do you begin?

开始的一种方法是确定游戏空间的组织原则。如果你已经对游戏玩法有了相当好的想法,那么这应该相当容易。只需通过镜头 #26功能空间(来自第 12 章机制)查看你的游戏,并将其用作你将构建的空间的骨架。

One way to begin is to decide on an organizing principle for your game space. If you already have a pretty good idea how your game will be played, this should be pretty easy. Just look at your game through Lens #26: Functional Space (from Chapter 12: Mechanics), and use that as the skeleton for the space you will build.

但也许你还在考虑你的功能空间——也许你的游戏设计还处于早期阶段,你希望通过创建地图来更好地了解游戏的运作方式。在这种情况下,以下是设计师组织游戏空间的五种常见方式。

But maybe you are still figuring out your functional space—perhaps your game design is still very early, and you are hoping that by creating a map, you might get a better sense of how your game works. In that case, here are five common ways that designers organize their game spaces.

  1. 线性:许多游戏都以线性游戏空间进行排列,玩家只能沿着一条线向前移动,有时也可以向后移动。有时这条线有两个端点;有时它会绕回自身。一些著名的线性游戏空间如下:

    1. 糖果乐园

    2. 垄断

    3. 超级马里奥兄弟

    4. 疯狂喷气背包

    5. 吉他英雄

  2. Linear: A surprising number of games are arranged on a linear game space where a player can only move forward and (maybe) back along a line. Sometimes the line has two ends; other times, it loops back on itself. Some well-known linear game spaces are as follows:

    1. Candyland

    2. Monopoly

    3. Super Mario Brothers

    4. Jetpack Joyride

    5. Guitar Hero

  3. 网格:将游戏空间布置在网格上有很多好处。它可以让玩家更容易理解,更容易确保事物排列整齐,保持事物的适当比例,当然,网格也很容易让计算机理解。您的网格不一定是正方形的网格,也可以是矩形、六边形(在战争游戏中很常见)甚至三角形。一些著名的基于网格的游戏如下:

    1. 高级战争

    2. 卡坦岛的定居者

    3. 塞尔达传说 (NES)

    4. 我的世界

  4. Grid: Arranging your game space on a grid has a lot of advantages. It can be easy for players to understand, it makes it easier to ensure that things line up, it keeps things in proper proportion, and of course, grids are very easy for computers to understand. Your grid need not be a grid of squares—it can also be of rectangles, hexagons (popular in war games), or even triangles. Some well-known grid-based games are as follows:

    1. Chess

    2. Advance Wars

    3. Settlers of Catan

    4. Legend of Zelda (NES)

    5. Minecraft

  5. 网络:网络布局是通过在地图上标记几个点并用路径连接它们来实现的。当您有几个地方想要玩家访问,但又想给他们提供多种不同的到达方式时,这种方法非常有用。有时沿着路径可以进行有意义的旅行,但有时旅行是即时的。以下是一些基于网络的游戏空间示例:

    1. 狐狸和鹅

    2. 平凡的追求

    3. 佐克

    4. 企鹅俱乐部

    5. 解谜探索

  6. Web: A web arrangement is achieved by marking several points on a map and connecting them with paths. This is useful when you have several places you want players to visit but you want to give them a number of different ways to get to them. Sometimes there is meaningful travel along the paths, but other times, travel is instantaneous. Some examples of web-based game spaces are as follows:

    1. Fox and Geese

    2. Trivial Pursuit

    3. Zork

    4. Club Penguin

    5. Puzzle Quest

  7. 空间中的点:这种不太常见的游戏空间类型通常用于那些想要唤起某种感觉的游戏,例如在沙漠中漫步,偶尔回到绿洲,就像在角色扮演游戏中一样。对于玩家可以自己定义游戏空间的游戏来说,这种空间组织也很常见。以下是这种空间组织的一些示例:

    1. 地掷球

    2. 薄冰(一种使用湿弹珠和餐巾的棋盘游戏)

    3. 极性(磁性棋盘游戏)

    4. 保护动物

    5. 最终幻想

  8. Points in space: This somewhat uncommon type of game space is usually for games that want to evoke something like wandering a desert and occasionally returning to an oasis, like one does in an RPG. It also is common for games where players get to define the game space themselves. Some examples of this kind of spatial organization are the following:

    1. Bocce

    2. Thin Ice (a board game involving wet marbles and a napkin)

    3. Polarity (magnetic board game)

    4. Animal Crossing

    5. Final Fantasy

  9. 分割空间:这种空间最像真实地图,在试图复制真实地图的游戏中很常见。它是通过以不规则的方式将空间划分为多个部分来实现的。以下是一些具有分割空间的游戏示例:

    1. 风险

    2. 轴心国与同盟国

    3. 黑暗塔

    4. 塞尔达传说:时之笛

    5. 文明

  10. Divided space: This kind of space is most like a real map and is common in games that are trying to replicate a real map. It is achieved by carving the space up into sections in an irregular way. Some examples of games that have divided space are as follows:

    1. Risk

    2. Axis and Allies

    3. Dark Tower

    4. Zelda: Ocarina of Time

    5. Civilization

这些不同的组织原则经常结合在一起,形成有趣的新型游戏空间。《妙探寻凶》游戏是网格和分割空间模式的组合。棒球是线性结构和空间点的组合。

These different organizing principles are often combined to make interesting new types of game spaces. The game of Clue is a combination of the grid and divided space patterns. Baseball is a combination of a linear structure and points in space.

关于地标

A Word about Landmarks

组织空间时,有一件非常重要的事情需要考虑:地标是什么?第一款文字冒险游戏《巨型洞穴》有两个不同的迷宫。其中一个迷宫中,每个区域都被描述为“你身处一个曲折通道的迷宫中,所有通道都一样。”然而,另一个迷宫同样令人困惑,其中每个区域都被描述为“你身处一个曲折通道的迷宫中,所有通道都不同。”因为太多混乱和太多秩序一样单调,这确实是真的。《巨型洞穴》的玩家学会了在迷宫中扔下物品,形成地标,帮助他们找到路。任何好的游戏空间都有内置地标,这有助于玩家可以找到他们要去的地方,也可以让空间看起来更有趣。地标是玩家记住的,也是他们谈论的,因为它们让一个空间令人难忘。

One very important thing to consider whenever you organize a space: What are the landmarks? The very first text adventure game, Colossal Cave, had two different mazes. In one, every area was described as “You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.” Just as confusing though was the opposite maze, in which every area was described as “You are in a maze of twisty passages, all different.” For it is certainly true that too much chaos is just as monotonous as too much order. Players of Colossal Cave learned to drop items in the mazes, forming landmarks that helped them find their way. Any good game space has built-in landmarks, which help the players find where they are going and also make the space interesting to look at. Landmarks are what players remember and what they talk about, for they are what make a space memorable.

克里斯托弗·亚历山大是个天才

Christopher Alexander Is a Genius

克里斯托弗·亚历山大 (Christopher Alexander) 是一位建筑师,他一生致力于研究场所如何让我们产生感觉。他的第一本书《永恒的建筑之道》 (1979) 试图描述真正设计精良的空间和物体如何具有独特的品质。正如他所说:

Christopher Alexander is an architect who has devoted his life to studying how places make us feel. His first book, The Timeless Way of Building (1979), tries to describe how there is a unique quality shared by spaces and objects that are truly well designed. As he puts it:

想象一下,在一个冬日的午后,你手边有一壶茶、一盏阅读灯,还有两三个可以靠着的大枕头。现在让自己舒服一点。不是以一种你可以向别人展示的方式,也不是说你有多喜欢它。我的意思是,你真的喜欢它,为自己。

你把茶放在伸手可及的地方,但不能把它碰倒。你把灯拉下来,照在书上,但不要太亮,以免看到裸露的灯泡。你把垫子放在身后,小心地一个接一个地放在你想要的位置,支撑你的背部、脖子和手臂:这样你就能舒服地得到支撑,就像你想喝茶、读书和做梦一样。

当你不辞辛劳、小心谨慎地去做这一切时,它就会开始具有一种无名的品质。

Imagine yourself on a winter afternoon with a pot of tea, a reading light, and two or three huge pillows to lean back against. Now make yourself comfortable. Not in some way which you can show to other people, and say how much you like it. I mean so that you really like it, for yourself.

You put the tea where you can reach it: but in a place where you can’t possibly knock it over. You pull the light down, to shine on the book, but not too brightly, and so that you can’t see the naked bulb. You put the cushions behind you, and place them, carefully, one by one, just where you want them, to support your back, your neck, your arm: so that you are supported just comfortably, just as you want to sip your tea, and read, and dream.

When you take the trouble to do all that, and you do it carefully, with much attention, then it may begin to have the quality which has no name.

很难确切地说出这种品质是什么,但大多数人在体验到它时就会知道。亚历山大指出,具有这种无名品质的事物通常具有以下特点:

It is hard to put a finger on exactly what this quality is, but most people know it when they experience it. Alexander notes that things that have the nameless quality usually have these aspects:

  • 它们给人一种充满活力的感觉,就像拥有能量一样。

  • They feel alive, as if they hold energy.

  • 他们感觉很完整,好像什么都不缺少。

  • They feel whole, like nothing is missing.

  • 他们感觉很舒服;和他们在一起很愉快。

  • They feel comfortable; it is pleasing to be around them.

  • 他们感觉很自由,没有受到不自然的约束。

  • They feel free, not constrained unnaturally.

  • 它们给人的感觉十分准确,就好像它们就是它们本来的样子一样。

  • They feel exact, as if they are just how they are supposed to be.

  • 他们感觉自己无私,与宇宙相连。

  • They feel egoless, connected to the universe.

  • 它们给人一种永恒的感觉,仿佛它们一直存在并将永远存在。

  • They feel eternal, as if they have always been and always will be.

  • 他们没有内心矛盾

  • They are free from inner contradictions.

最后一点,“摆脱内在矛盾”,对任何设计师来说都非常重要,因为内在矛盾是任何糟糕设计的核心。如果一个设备本应让我的生活更轻松,但它却很难使用,那就是矛盾。如果某样东西本应有趣,但它却很无聊或令人沮丧,那就是矛盾。矛盾。一个好的设计师必须小心地消除内在矛盾,而不是习惯于它们,或为它们找借口——所以让我们在工具箱中添加一个工具来消除它们。

The last of those, “free from inner contradictions,” is tremendously important to any designer, because inner contradictions are at the heart of any bad design. If a device is supposed to make my life easier, and it is hard to use, that is a contradiction. If something is supposed to be fun, and it is boring or frustrating, that is a contradiction. A good designer must carefully remove inner contradictions, and not get used to them, or make excuses for them—so let’s add a tool to our toolbox for removing them.

Alexander 还解释说,只有通过迭代和观察某物如何使用,才能得出真正优秀的设计。换句话说,循环规则既适用于建筑,也适用于游戏设计。一个具体的例子是他描述的在建筑群中铺设建筑物之间的道路的系统:“根本不要铺设道路。只种草。一年后再回来,看看人们在草地上踩出的道路,然后才开始铺路。”

Alexander also explains that only through iteration and observation about how something is used can one arrive at a truly excellent design. In other words, the Rule of the Loop holds in architecture as well as game design. A concrete example of this is the system he describes for laying paths between buildings in a complex: “Lay no paths at all. Merely plant grass. Then come back a year later, see where people have worn paths in the grass, and only then begin to pave.”

亚历山大的下一本书《模式语言》是他最著名、最具影响力的作品。在书中,他描述了 253 种不同的建筑模式,这些模式似乎具有不可名状的特质。它们的范围从“城镇分布”和“农业山谷”等大规模模式到“帆布屋顶”和“敞开的窗户”等小规模模式。《模式语言》的范围和惊人的细节改变了读者对他们如何与日常世界互动的看法。许多游戏设计师都有关于这本书如何启发他们的故事。就我个人而言,我对如何构建Toontown Online的世界感到困惑,直到我读到这篇文章,突然间大部分内容都变得显而易见。据说威尔·赖特设计SimCity是基于想要尝试书中列出的模式的愿望。计算机科学中的整个“设计模式”运动也源于这本书的力量。当你阅读它时,你会创造什么?

Alexander’s next book, A Pattern Language, is his most famous and influential work. In it, he describes 253 different architectural patterns that seem to have the nameless quality. They range from large-scale patterns like “distribution of towns” and “agricultural valleys” to small-scale patterns such as “canvas roofs” and “windows which open wide.” The scope and striking detail of A Pattern Language changes the reader’s viewpoint about how they interact with the everyday world. Many game designers have stories to tell about how the book inspired them. Personally, I was baffled about how to structure the world of Toontown Online until I read this text, and suddenly much of it seemed obvious. Will Wright is said to have designed SimCity based on a desire to experiment with the patterns listed in the book. The entire “design patterns” movement in computer science stems from the power of this text as well. What will you create when you read it?

亚历山大并不满足于让无名品质保持无名状态。在他后来的著作中,他更深入地研究了什么真正赋予了某种事物特殊的感觉。他列举了数千种有或没有这种感觉的事物,然后寻找它们之间的相似之处。在此过程中,他逐渐提炼出这些事物所共有的十五种基本品质,详见《生命现象》。这本书的标题源于他对无名品质的洞察:某些事物之所以对我们来说很特别,是因为它们具有生物所具有的一些相同品质。作为生物,我们会对具有生物特殊品质的事物和地方产生联系。

Alexander was not content to leave the nameless quality nameless. In his later books, he makes a deeper study of what truly gives something that special feeling. He did this by cataloging thousands of different things that did, or did not, have that feeling and then looked for similarities between them. In doing so, he gradually distilled out fifteen fundamental qualities that these things shared, as detailed in The Phenomenon of Life. The book gets its title from an insight he had about the nameless quality: The reason some things seem special to us is that they have some of the same qualities that living things have. As living beings ourselves, we feel connected to things and places that have qualities special to living things.

详细探讨这些属性远远超出了本书的范围,但思考你的游戏是否包含这些属性会很有趣也很有帮助。思考这些模式(主要与空间和纹理质量有关)如何应用于游戏是一种很好的脑力锻炼。

Delving into detail about these properties is well beyond the scope of this book, but it can be fascinating and useful to reflect on whether your game contains them. It is excellent mental exercise just to think about how these patterns, which mostly are about spatial and textural qualities, apply to games at all.

亚历山大生命结构的十五个特性

Alexander’s Fifteen Properties of Living Structures

  1. 规模层次:我们在“伸缩目标”中看到了规模层次,玩家必须满足短期目标才能实现中期目标,并最终实现长期目标。我们在分形兴趣曲线中看到了这一点。我们也在嵌套的游戏世界结构中看到了这一点。《孢子》是规模层次的交响曲。

  2. Levels of scale: We see levels of scale in “telescoping goals,” where a player has to satisfy short-term goals to reach midterm ones and to eventually reach long-term goals. We see it in fractal interest curves. We also see it in nested game world structures. Spore is a symphony of levels of scale.

  3. 强势中心:我们当然会在视觉布局中看到这一点,但也会在我们的故事结构中看到这一点。角色是我们游戏世界的中心——一般来说,我们更喜欢强势角色,而不是弱势角色。此外,当涉及到我们在游戏中的目的——我们的目标时,我们更喜欢强势中心。

  4. Strong centers: We see this in visual layout, certainly, but also in our story structure. The avatar is at the center of our game universe—and generally we prefer strong avatars over weak ones. Also, we prefer strong centers when it comes to our purpose in the game—our goal.

  5. 边界:许多游戏主要涉及边界!当然,任何有关领土的游戏都是对边界的探索。但规则是另一种边界,没有规则的游戏根本就不是游戏。

  6. Boundaries: Many games are primarily about boundaries! Certainly, any game about territory is an exploration of boundaries. But rules are another kind of boundary, and a game with no rules is no game at all.

  7. 交替重复:我们在棋盘的赏心悦目形状上看到了这一点,我们也在很多游戏中出现的关卡/boss/关卡/boss 循环中看到了这一点。即使是紧张/放松/紧张/放松也是令人愉悦的交替重复的一个例子,如图10.7所示。

  8. Alternating repetition: We see this on the pleasing shape of the chessboard, and we see it too in the cycle of level/boss/level/boss that comes up in so many games. Even tense/release/tense/release is an example of pleasing alternating repetition, as seen in Figure 10.7.

  9. 正空间:亚历山大在这里的意思是,前景和背景元素都具有美丽、互补的形状,就像阴和阳。从某种意义上说,平衡良好的游戏具有这种品质——允许多种替代策略具有相互交织的美感。

  10. Positive space: What Alexander means here is that the foreground and background elements both have beautiful, complementary shapes, like yin and yang. In a sense, a well-balanced game has this quality—allowing multiple alternate strategies to have an interlocked beauty.

  11. 良好的形状:这听起来很简单——令人愉悦的形状。我们当然会在游戏的视觉元素中寻找这种形状。但我们也可以在关卡设计中看到和感受到它。好的关卡让人感觉“坚固”,并且具有“良好的曲线”。

  12. Good shape: This is as simple as it sounds—a shape that is pleasing. We certainly look for this in the visual elements of our games. But we can see and feel it, too, in level design. A good level feels “solid” and has a “good curve.”

  13. 局部对称:这与镜像等整体对称不同;而是指设计中的多个小的内部对称。《塞尔达传说:风之杖》的整个架构都给人这种感觉——当你身处一个房间或区域时,它似乎具有对称性,但它以一种有机的方式与其他地方相连。规则系统和游戏平衡也可以具有这种特性。

  14. Local symmetries: This is different from an overall symmetry, like a mirror image; instead, this refers to multiple small, internal symmetries in a design. Zelda: The Wind Waker has this feeling throughout its architecture—when you are within a room or area, it seems to have a symmetry, but it is connected to other places in a way that feels organic. Rule systems and game balance can have this property as well.

  15. 深度交错和模糊性:当两个事物紧密交织在一起时,它们会相互定义——如果你拿走其中一个,另一个就不再是它自己了。我们在许多棋盘游戏中都看到这种情况,例如围棋。棋盘上棋子的位置只有相对于对手的棋子才有意义。

  16. Deep interlock and ambiguity: This is when two things are so tightly intertwined that they define each other—if you took one away, the other wouldn’t be itself any longer. We see this in many board games, such as Go. The position of the pieces on the board is only meaningful relative to the opponent’s pieces.

  17. 对比:在游戏中,我们有很多种对比。对手之间的对比、可控与不可控之间的对比、奖励与惩罚之间的对比。当我们游戏中的对立面形成强烈对比时,游戏会感觉更有意义、更有力量。

  18. Contrast: In games, we have many kinds of contrast. The contrast between opponents, between what is controllable and what is not, and between reward and punishment. When opposites in our game are strongly contrasted, the game feels more meaningful and more powerful.

  19. 梯度:这指的是逐渐变化的品质。逐渐增加的挑战曲线就是一个例子,但适当设计的概率曲线也是如此。

  20. Gradients: This refers to qualities that change gradually. The gradually increasing challenge curve is an example of this, but so are appropriately designed probability curves.

  21. 粗糙度:如果游戏太过完美,就会失去特色。“家庭规则”的手工感通常会让游戏看起来更有活力。

  22. Roughness: When a game is too perfect, it has no character. The handmade feeling of “house rules” often makes a game seem more alive.

  23. 回声:回声是一种令人愉悦的、统一的重复。当怪物头目与他的手下有共同点时,我们就会体验到回声。好的兴趣曲线具有这种特性,尤其是分形曲线。

  24. Echoes: Echoes are a kind of pleasing, unifying repetition. When the boss monster has something in common with his minions, we are experiencing echoes. Good interest curves have this property, especially fractal ones.

  25. 虚空:正如亚历山大所说,“在最深邃、最完美的中心,心脏处有一个像水一样的虚空,深度无限,被周围杂乱的物质和织物包围,与之形成鲜明对比。”想想教堂或人类的心脏。当 Boss 怪物倾向于待在巨大的空洞中时,我们正在体验虚空。

  26. The void: As Alexander says, “In the most profound centers which have perfect wholeness, there is at the heart a void which is like water, infinite in depth, surrounded by and contrasted with the clutter of the stuff and fabric all around it.” Think of a church, or the human heart. When boss monsters tend to be in large, hollow spaces, we are experiencing the void.

  27. 简单和内心的平静:设计师们不断谈论游戏简单的重要性——通常包含少量具有突发特性的规则。当然,这些规则必须保持良好的平衡,这才能让他们获得亚历山大所描述的内心的平静。

  28. Simplicity and inner calm: Designers talk endlessly about how important it is for a game to be simple—usually with a small number of rules that have emergent properties. Of course, these rules must be well balanced, which gives them the inner calm that Alexander describes.

  29. 非分离性:这指的是某物与周围环境紧密相连——就好像它是其中的一部分一样。我们游戏的每条规则都应该具有这种属性,但我们游戏的每个元素也应该如此。如果我们游戏中的一切都具有这种品质,就会产生一定的完整性,这确实会让游戏感觉非常生动。镜头 #11统一可以很好地指导非分离性。

  30. Not-separateness: This refers to something being well connected to its surroundings—as if it was part of them. Each rule of our game should have this property, but so should every element of our game. If everything in our game has this quality, a certain wholeness results, which makes the game feel very alive indeed. Lens #11: Unification can be a good guide to not-separateness.

亚历山大的建筑方法在设计游戏空间时非常有用。但正如您所见,他所描述的良好空间的品质也适用于游戏设计的许多其他方面。我在这里只是触及了亚历山大设计方法的表面。阅读他的许多令人愉快的书籍肯定会让您对游戏设计有新的见解。为了提醒他深思熟虑的观点,请用这个镜头。

Alexander’s approach to architecture can be quite useful when designing a game space. But as you see, the qualities he describes for a good space apply to many other aspects of game design as well. I have only been able to scratch the surface of Alexander’s approach to design here. Reading his many delightful books will surely give you new insights into game design. As a reminder of his thoughtful perspective, take this lens.

真实与虚拟架构

Real vs. Virtual Architecture

亚历山大关于建筑的“深层基础”观点很有用,但详细研究虚拟建筑的一些特殊之处也很有用。当我们研究一些为流行电子游戏制作的空间时,它们通常非常奇怪。它们有大量浪费的空间、怪异而危险的建筑特征,与外部环境没有真正的关系,有时甚至以物理上不可能的方式与自身重叠。

Alexander’s “deep fundamentals” perspective on architecture is useful, but it is also useful to look in detail at some of the peculiarities special to virtual architecture. When we study some of the spaces that have been made for popular videogames, they are often very strange. They have huge amounts of wasted space, weird and dangerous architectural features, and no real relationship with their outside environment, and sometimes areas even overlap with themselves in physically impossible ways.

现实世界的建筑师会认为这些奇怪的建筑构造是疯狂的。看看那些奇怪的空心空间和所有的水。那么为什么我们在玩电子游戏时没有注意到建筑布局有多么奇怪呢?

These sorts of bizarre building constructs would be considered madness by real-world architects. Look at those weird hollow spaces and all that water. So why is it that when we play videogames, we don’t notice how strange the building layouts are?

这是因为人类的大脑在将 3D 空间转换成 2D 地图时非常薄弱。如果你不相信我,请想象一个熟悉的地方,一个你经常去的地方,比如你的家、学校或工作场所,然后试着画一张它的地图。大多数人觉得这很困难——这根本不是我们储存空间的方式——我们思考它们是相对的,而不是绝对的。我们知道哪扇门通向哪个房间,但对于没有门的墙后面是什么,我们并不总是很确定。因此,3D 空间是否具有逼真的 2D 蓝图并不重要。重要的是玩家身处其中时对空间的感觉。

It is because the human mind is very weak when it comes to translating 3D spaces into 2D maps. If you don’t believe me, think of a familiar place, somewhere you go all the time like your home, school, or workplace, and try to draw a map of it. Most people find this quite difficult—this simply isn’t how we store spaces in our minds—we think of them relatively, not absolutely. We know which doors go to which rooms, but as for what is behind a wall with no doors, we aren’t always quite sure. For that reason, it is not important that 3D spaces have realistic 2D blueprints. All that matters is how the space feels when the player is in it.



21.2

FIGURE

21.2

在现实世界中没有人会建造这个。

No one would build this in the real world.

知道有多大

Know How Big

当我们身处真实空间时,我们自然而然地会产生一种比例感,因为我们有如此多的线索——灯光、阴影、纹理、立体视觉,以及最重要的,我们自己的身体的存在。但在虚拟空间中,比例并不总是那么清晰。由于缺少如此多的现实世界线索,很容易创建一个比实际大得多或小得多的虚拟空间。这可能会让玩家感到非常困惑和迷失方向。我经常与学生和其他新手世界构建者进行这样的对话:

When we are in real spaces, a sense of scale comes naturally to us, because we have so many cues—lighting, shadows, textures, stereo vision, and, most importantly, the presence of our own bodies. But in virtual spaces, scale is not always so clear. Because so many real-world cues are missing, it is very easy to create a virtual space that is really much bigger or smaller than it looks. This can be very confusing and disorienting for players. I frequently have conversation with students and other novice world builders that go something like this:

虚拟建筑师:我的世界看起来很有趣……但我不知道为什么……

我:嗯,看起来比例不对——那辆车对于街道来说太大了,而那些窗户对于那栋建筑来说又太小了。那辆车到底有多大?

虚拟建筑师:我不知道……也许是五个单位?

我:那么一个单位有多大?

虚拟建筑师:我不知道。一切都是虚拟的……这有什么关系?

Virtual Architect: My world looks funny… but I don’t know why…

Me: Well, things seem out of scale—that car is too big for the street, and those windows are too small for that building. How big is that car, anyway?

Virtual Architect: I don’t know… Maybe five units?

Me: So how big is a unit?

Virtual Architect: I don’t know. It’s all virtual… why does it matter?

从某种意义上说,他是对的——只要你的世界中的一切都按适当的比例排列,你的虚拟单位可以是英尺、米、腕尺或蓝精灵帽,这都无所谓。但是一旦任何东西超出比例,或者你怀疑它可能超出比例,这就成为一个非常重要的问题,因为那时你必须将事物与现实世界联系起来。出于这个原因,明智的做法是将你的游戏单位设为你在现实世界中非常熟悉的东西——对大多数人来说,是英尺或米。这将节省大量时间和避免混乱,因为如果你的单位是英尺,而你的车有三十个单位长,你很快就会知道问题出在哪里。

And in one sense, he’s right—as long as everything in your world is in proper proportion, your virtual units could be feet, meters, cubits, or Smurf hats, and it doesn’t matter. But the moment that anything is out of scale, or you suspect it might be out of scale, it becomes a very important question, because then you have to relate things back to the real world. For this reason, it is wise to make your game units something that you are intimately familiar with in the real world—for most people, feet or meters. This will save a lot of time and confusion, because if your units are feet, and your car is thirty units long, you will quickly know what the problem is.

但有时,你的世界中的元素比例合适,但对于玩家来说,事物看起来不成比例。这种情况的典型罪魁祸首包括以下几点:

But sometimes the elements of your world are properly proportioned, but to the players, things look out of scale. The typical culprits in this case include the following:

  • 眼睛高度:如果您的第一人称游戏的虚拟摄像头非常高(距离地面七英尺以上)或非常低(距离地面不到五英尺),它就会扭曲世界的视野,因为人们倾向于假设眼睛高度与自己的眼睛高度相似。

  • Eye height: If you have a first-person game with the virtual camera very high (more than seven feet off the ground) or very low (less than five feet off the ground), it will distort the view of the world, since people tend to assume an eye height similar to their own.

  • 人物和门道:人物和门道(当然,门道是为容纳人而设计的)是规模的两个最有力的线索。如果你的世界里有巨人或小矮人,玩家可能会对规模感到困惑;同样,如果你决定游戏中的门道很大或很小,这同样会让人感到困惑。如果你没有人物、门道或其他常见尺寸的人造物体,玩家通常会对规模感到困惑。

  • People and doorways: Two of the strongest cues for scale are people and doorways (which of course, are designed to accommodate people). If you have a world of giants or little people, it can confuse the player about scale; similarly, if you have decided that doorways are very large or very small in your game, that can be similarly confusing. If you have no people, doorways, or other commonly sized man-made objects, players often can get a little confused about scale.

  • 纹理缩放:设计世界时,一个容易犯的错误是纹理的比例不合适,例如墙上的砖块纹理太大或地砖纹理太小。确保您使用的纹理与现实世界中的纹理比例相匹配。

  • Texture scaling: An easy error to make when designing a world is to have textures that are not at the proper scale, such as a brick texture on the wall that is too large or a floor tile texture that is too small. Be sure that the textures you use match the scale of textures in the real world.

第三人称扭曲

Third-Person Distortion

设计虚拟空间还有另一个特殊之处。我们每个人都对身体与所见世界的关系形成了自然的感觉。当我们玩第三人称电子游戏时,我们可以看到自己的身体,我们的大脑会做出一件神奇的事情;它让我们同时处于两个地方——既在角色的身体里,又漂浮在身体后方八英尺的地方——同时让这种奇怪的视角感觉非常自然。虽然我们在游戏中能够看到自己的虚拟身体,这给了我们很大的好处,但我们的比例感却发生了非常奇怪的变化。在宽阔的户外场景中,我们大多不会注意到这一点。但当我们试图控制一个处于正常大小室内空间的角色时,空间会让人感到拥挤不堪,就像我们开着车在房子里转悠一样。

There is another special peculiarity of designing virtual spaces. Each of us has developed a natural sense of the relationship of how our bodies fit into the world that we see. When we play a third-person videogame, where we can see our body, our brain does an amazing thing; it somehow lets us be in two places at once—in the body of our character, but also floating eight feet behind our body—all the while letting this strange perspective feel very natural. And while we get tremendous benefits from being able to see our virtual body in a game, something very odd happens to our sense of proportion. In wide-open outdoor scenes, we mostly don’t notice this. But when we try to control a character who is in a normal-sized interior space, the space feels frustratingly crowded, like we are driving around a house in a car.



21.3

FIGURE

21.3

奇怪的是,大多数玩家并不认为这是第三人称角色系统的问题,而是认为房间太小了。有没有办法扭曲房间,让玩家在这个奇特的视角中体验时,房间看起来是正常的?

Weirdly, most players do not identify this as a problem with the third-person avatar system, but they think the room too small. Is there a way to distort the room so that when it is experienced in this peculiar perspective it looks normal?



21.4

FIGURE

21.4

解决方案 1:扩大房间和家具的规模。如果你扩大所有墙壁和家具的规模,确实会腾出更多空间来走动,但会给你一种奇怪的感觉,让你的化身像个小孩子一样小,因为椅子和沙发等正常尺寸的物体变得太大而无法坐下。

Solution 1: Scale up the room and the furniture. If you scale up all the walls and furniture, it does make more room to move around but gives a weird feeling of your avatar being tiny like a small child, as normal-sized objects like chairs and sofas become too big to sit on.



21.5

FIGURE

21.5

解决方案 2:扩大房间,但家具保持正常大小。现在,您的房间变得空旷,家具孤零零地挤在一起。

Solution 2: Scale up the room, but leave the furniture normal size. Now you have a cavernous room with furniture huddled together in lonely looking clusters.



21.6

FIGURE

21.6

解决方案 3:扩大房间,让家具保持正常大小,但将家具分散放置。这种方法效果更好一些——房间不再像洞穴一样,但房间看起来稀疏异常,房间内物体之间的间隙不自然地大。

Solution 3: Scale up the room, leave the furniture normal size, but spread the furniture out. This works a little better—the room no longer seems such a cavern, but it leaves the room looking strangely sparse, with unnaturally large spaces between objects in the room.



21.7

FIGURE

21.7

解决方案 4:扩大房间,稍微扩大家具,并将家具分散。这个解决方案由 Max Payne 的设计师首创,效果非常好。在第一人称视角中,这看起来有点奇怪,但在第三人称视角中,它可以很好地抵消由于视点远离身体而造成的扭曲。

Solution 4: Scale up the room, scale up the furniture a little bit, and spread the furniture out. This solution, pioneered by the designers of Max Payne, works very well. In a first-person view, this looks kind of strange, but in a third-person view, it does a very good job of counteracting the distortion caused by the eyepoint being far from the body.

关卡设计

Level Design

我们已经快到本章的结尾了,但我们还没有讨论关卡设计。或者我们讨论过吗?事实上,我们一直在讨论它!不仅在本章中,而且在整本书中。关卡设计师所做的就是以有趣和有意思的方式安排游戏中的架构、道具和挑战——也就是说,确保有适当的挑战级别、适当的奖励数量、适当数量的有意义的选择,以及构成好游戏的所有其他因素。关卡设计只是游戏设计中细节的体现——这并不容易,因为魔鬼就在细节中。每个游戏的关卡设计都不同,因为每个游戏都不同。但是,如果你在设计关卡时运用你所知道的所有游戏设计知识,通过多种视角仔细审视它,最好的关卡设计选择就会开始变得清晰起来。

We’re nearly at the end of this chapter, and we haven’t yet talked about level design. Or have we? In truth, we have been covering it all along! Not just in this chapter, but through the entire book. All a level designer does is arrange the architecture, props, and challenges in a game in ways that are fun and interesting—that is, making sure there is the right level of challenge, the right amount of reward, the right amount of meaningful choice, and all the other things that make a good game. Level design is just game design exercised in detail—and it isn’t easy, for the devil is in the details. Level design is different for every game, because every game is different. But if you use everything you know about game design when you design your level, examining it carefully through many lenses, the best level design choices will start to become clear.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 克里斯托弗·亚历山大 (Christopher Alexander) 著《永恒的建筑之道》。为所有设计师提供的建议。这是您应该阅读的第一本亚历山大著作。

  • The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. Genius advice for any designer. The first Alexander book you should read.

  • Christopher Alexander 等人著的《模式语言》。读完这本书,你将从此改变看待世界的方式。接下来读这本书。

  • A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. Read this, and never see the world the same way again. Read this one next.

  • 《秩序的本质》,第 1-4 册。后代会惊讶于亚历山大在世时我们竟然无法欣赏这些书。最后读这些书。

  • The Nature of Order, books 1–4. Future generations will marvel that we were unable to appreciate these books while Alexander was alive. Read these last.

  • 游戏关卡设计创造引人入胜的游戏体验,作者:Phil Co。这是一本内容丰富的书,充满了有关游戏详细设计和文档的实用建议。

  • Level Design for Games: Creating Compelling Game Experiences by Phil Co. A solid book full of practical advice for the detailed design and documentation of your games.

第二十二

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

有些界面创造了一种存在感

Some Interfaces Create a Feeling of Presence



22.1

FIGURE

22.1

你如何知道你周围的环境是真实的,而不是幻觉?我们整天都在面对幻觉……照片、视频,甚至 3D 电影。尤其是视频和电影,它们能够吸引我们的意识,让我们的思想完全投入其中。但是,尽管它们可能很吸引人,看起来很逼真,但我们永远不会被愚弄,以为它们是真实的,与我们同在,因为我们可以看到和感觉到我们的身体并不在我们所看到的图像所在的位置。我们可能会将我们的思想投射到这些体验中,但我们从未投射我们的身体。但到了晚上,我们入睡,做梦。在梦中,我们面对的是另一组幻觉。尽管它们在逻辑上存在许多漏洞,但我们在那一刻接受它们是真实的,如此真实以至于有时我们醒来时嘴角挂着喜悦的微笑,或者喉咙里发出沮丧的叫喊。梦中的幻觉与大多数清醒时的幻觉不同。在梦中,我们不仅能体验到丰富的视觉和听觉(无需用眼睛和耳朵),还能体验到嗅觉、味觉、触觉等。在梦中,甚至我们的身体似乎也存在于我们大脑创造的幻觉中,因此,我们相信梦中的地方和事件是真实的。

How do you know that your surroundings are real, and not an illusion? We are presented with illusions all day long… photographs, videos, even 3D movies. Videos and movies, especially, have a power to pull in our consciousness, and fully engage our minds. But, as engrossing as they may be, and as realistic as they may look, we are never fooled into thinking they are real, in a real place with us, because we can see and feel that our bodies are not in the same place as the images we look upon. We might project our minds into these experiences, but we never project our bodies. But at night, we go to sleep, and dream. And in our dreams, we are presented with another set of illusions. Despite their many gaps in logic we accept them in the moment as real, so real that sometimes we wake with a smile of delight on our lips, or with a shout of dismay in our throats. The illusions of dreams are different than most waking illusions. In dreams, not only do we experience rich sights and sounds (all without using our eyes and ears), but we experience smell, taste, and touch, and something more. In dreams, even our bodies seem to be present in the illusions our minds create, and as a result, we believe the places and events we dream are real.

人们倾向于认为虚拟现实 (VR) 和增强现实 (AR) 是用来欺骗眼睛的技术。但更确切的说法是,这些技术是为了欺骗身体而设计的。好吧,不是欺骗身体本身,而是欺骗大脑对身体的感觉。这种感觉的专业术语是“本体感觉”,这个词于 1906 年源于拉丁语,意为“自我感觉”,这是一种非常强大的感觉。我们的身体与世界之间的关系决定了我们的大部分身份,以及我们如何判断什么是真实的,什么不是真实的。“掐我一下,我一定是在做梦”这句话表达了这样一种观点:我的眼睛和大脑可能被幻觉欺骗了,但发生在我身上的事情却是真实的。

People tend to think of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) as technologies designed to fool the eye. But it might be more correct to say that these are technologies designed to fool the body. Well, not the body itself, but rather the mind’s sense of the body. The technical term for this sense is “proprioception,” a word coined from Latin in 1906, meaning “a sense of one’s self,” and it is a very powerful sense. The relationship between our body and the world is how we define much of our identity, and how we decide what is and isn’t real. The expression “pinch me, I must be dreaming” is an expression of the idea that my eyes and mind might be fooled by illusions, but what happens to my body is real.

VR 和 AR 的真正魔力不只是 3D 图像。自 1838 年立体镜发明以来,3D 图像就一直存在。VR 和 AR 的魔力在于,它们让我们将身体带入模拟世界。这一点很重要,因为令人惊讶的是,我们不仅用大脑思考,还用身体思考。传统游戏(儿童游戏、运动游戏、派对游戏)经常涉及身体,但大多数数字游戏都尽量减少身体的参与。指尖的抽搐是大多数电子游戏唯一承认的身体部位。但身体的存在是真实存在的。VR 开发人员最常在玩家在他们的世界中无意识的行为中看到这一点。试图解决难题并不得不停下来思考的 VR 玩家通常会随意地靠在虚拟桌子或柜台上,却突然意识到那不是真实的,他们有摔倒的危险。当然,他们从理智上不会相信虚拟桌子是真实的,但他们潜意识中的某些部分发现沉浸式 3D 世界的呈现足够逼真,以至于他们准备将虚拟物体视为真实物体。这种临场感是心理学尚未充分理解的,也是 VR 的核心魔力。

The true magic of VR and AR is not simply 3D images. Those have been around since the invention of the stereoscope in 1838. No, the magic of VR and AR is that they let us bring our bodies into the world of the simulation. And this is important, because, surprisingly, we do a lot of thinking not just with our brains, but with our bodies. Traditional games (children’s games, athletic games, party games) frequently involve the body, but most digital games try to involve the body as little as possible. The twitching tips of your fingers are the only part of the body most videogames acknowledge. But bodily presence is a real thing. VR developers see it most in the unconscious behaviors of players in their worlds. A VR player who is trying to solve a puzzle, and has to stop and think will often casually lean on a virtual table or counter, only to suddenly realize that it isn’t real and they are in danger of falling over. Of course, they never intellectually believed that the virtual table was real, but some subconscious part of their mind found the presentation of the immersive 3D world realistic enough that it was prepared to treat virtual objects as real ones. This feeling of presence, not well understood by psychology, is the central magic of VR.

但是 AR 呢?关于 VR 和 AR 哪个会对游戏世界产生最大影响,存在很多争论。虽然在撰写本文时,VR 似乎对游戏最有前景,因为它能够将你带入一个幻想世界,但经常听到人们说:“我对 VR 不感兴趣——我真正想要的是 AR。”他们真正想说的是,将他们的身体送入一个虚拟世界对他们没有吸引力,他们想要的是模拟物体和实体来到他们身边,让这些东西加入他们进入现实世界。这是可以理解的——将你的身体送到另一个地方的想法对某些人来说很令人兴奋,但会让其他人感到不舒服和脆弱。幻想世界不仅可能很奇怪或可怕,而且当你的思维集中在虚拟世界时,在现实世界中失去对你身体的追踪是一个令人不安的概念。可以说,AR 体验是将模拟带到我的身体所在的“这里”,而 VR 体验是将我的身体带到模拟所在的“那里”。将真实/模拟和这里/那里放在不同的轴上,你会得到一个图表,显示四种不同的与现实交互的方式:

But what about AR? There is much debate about which will have the greatest impact on the game world: VR or AR? While at the time of this writing, VR seems to have the most promise for games, due to its ability to transport you to a fantasy world, it is common to hear people say, “I’m not interested in VR – what I really want is AR.” What they are really saying is that the idea of sending their body into a virtual world is not appealing to them, that what they want is for simulated objects and entities to come to them, to have these things join them in the real world. And this is understandable—the idea of sending your body to another place is exciting to some, but can make others feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. Not only could the fantasy place be weird or scary, but losing track of your body in the real world, as your mind focuses on a virtual world instead, is a disturbing concept. One could say that AR experiences are about bringing simulations “here” where my body is, and VR experiences are about sending my body “there” where the simulation is. Put both real/simulated and here/there on different axes, and you get a diagram showing four different ways of interfacing with reality:



22.2

FIGURE

22.2

当然,不同的游戏体验适合不同的象限。到目前为止,“远程呈现”象限中的游戏非常少,但谁知道呢?也许有一天,远程呈现机器人会变得很普遍,从而开辟全新的游戏类别。

Different play experiences, of course, are suited to different quadrants. To date, there have been very few games in the “telepresence” quadrant, but, who knows? Perhaps the day is coming when telepresence robots become common, opening up whole new categories of games.

作为游戏设计师,我们一直在创造新的现实。每个模拟都是一种新的现实。值得思考的是,我们可以创造许多种现实:

As game designers, we make new realities all the time. Every simulation is a kind of new reality. It is worth thinking about some of the many kinds of reality that we can create:

  • 逻辑现实定义了因果规则。

  • Logical Reality defines the rules of cause and effect.

  • 空间现实定义了我如何在空间中移动。

  • Spatial Reality defines how I move through space.

  • 本体感受现实定义了我的身体感觉在哪里。

  • Proprioceptive Reality defines where it feels like my body is.

  • 社会现实决定了我如何与他人互动。

  • Social Reality defines how I interact with others.

前面的章节已经讨论了很多关于创造令人信服的逻辑现实和空间现实,接下来的章节将讨论社会现实。但是,由存在的力量创造的本体感受现实是非常特殊的,也值得我们考虑。存在感可能比看起来更重要。毕竟,有人说幸福的秘诀是“存在感”,而一些冥想者声称,通过每天“存在感”,生活的意义就展现在他们面前。

Previous chapters have talked a lot about creating compelling logical realities and spatial realities, and upcoming chapters will talk about social realities. But proprioceptive realities, created by the power of presence, are something very special, and also worthy of our consideration. Presence might be more important than it seems. After all, some say that the secret to happiness is “to be present,” and some who meditate claim that by “being present” on a daily basis, the very meaning of life has unfolded before them.

存在的力量

The Power of Presence

当一种新媒体出现时,人们会从旧媒体中复制一些东西。当电影被发明时,人们拍摄舞台剧,却没有意识到剪辑和编辑是新媒体的核心。当互联网视频被发明时,人们为其制作了昂贵的三十到六十分钟的节目,却没有意识到人们真正想要的是简短的业余视频。同样,现在 VR 和 AR 已经出现,许多人试图复制主机、PC 和手机游戏领域中行之有效的东西,却没有意识到 VR 和 AR 的核心是新的东西。VR 和 AR 的核心是临场感。

When a new medium appears, people copy things from the old one. When motion pictures were invented, people filmed stage plays, not realizing that cuts and editing would be the heart of the new medium. When Internet video was invented, people created expensive thirty- and sixty-minute programs for it, not realizing that short amateur videos were what people really wanted. And, similarly, now that VR and AR have appeared, many people are trying to copy what has worked in the worlds of console, PC, and mobile gaming, not realizing that the heart of VR and AR is something new. The heart of VR and AR is presence.

六个破坏存在感的因素

Six Presence Breakers

不幸的是,这些技术带来的临场感并非毫无代价。临场感是一种脆弱的幻觉,就像魔术师的把戏,一次尴尬的互动就可能破坏整个效果。如果你要设计一种以临场感为中心的体验,你必须考虑一个令人不安的想法,即临场感可能比游戏玩法更重要。还记得玩具的镜头吗?即使没有游戏玩法,玩家也很乐意摆弄他们能感受到临场感的世界的元素。但如果临场感被破坏或中断,玩家就会非常清楚自己戴着耳机,甚至可能会对整个体验感到厌烦,无论游戏玩法实际上有多好。这对许多游戏开发者来说是不可想象的,他们全心全意地相信游戏玩法是第一位的,不管怎样。但是,想想看:如果你的 VR 或 AR 体验的重点是让玩家在虚拟世界中感到临场感,而临场感被破坏了,你提供的是什么体验?那些花时间在这些新媒体上工作的人开始意识到,临场感的幻觉实际上是多么脆弱,必须付出多大的努力才能保持它。为此,以下列出了对存在感最大的六大威胁。

Unfortunately, presence does not come for free with these technologies. Presence is a fragile illusion, a magician’s trick where one awkward interaction can spoil the whole effect. If you are going to design an experience centered on a feeling of presence, you must consider the disturbing notion that presence might be even more important than gameplay. Remember the Lens of the Toy? Players are glad to fiddle about with the elements of a world in which they feel presence, even if no gameplay is there. But if the presence is broken or interrupted, the player becomes very aware that they are in a headset, and may even become annoyed by the whole experience, no matter how good the gameplay actually is. This is inconceivable to many game developers, who believe wholeheartedly that gameplay comes first, no matter what. But, consider: if the very point of your VR or AR experience is that the player feels present in the virtual world, and that illusion of presence is broken, what experience are you providing? Those who spend time working in these new media come to realize how fragile an illusion presence really is, and how much effort must be expended to preserve it. To that end, here are six of the greatest dangers to the feeling of presence.

破坏存在感的因素 #1:晕动症

Presence Breaker #1: Motion Sickness

仔细想想,晕动症这种现象非常奇怪。当一个人面对不寻常的运动(例如,船、汽车或过山车的运动)或运动的外观(例如,IMAX 电影或 VR 赛车)时,他们的身体的反应是逐渐感到恶心,最终可能呕吐。为什么要呕吐?为什么不打喷嚏、发冷、感觉刺痛或出现其他可能的生理反应?为什么会有任何反应?答案被称为“毒理学假说”。某些毒素(例如来自某些蘑菇)会扰乱大脑的神经系统,使得来自内耳小毛发(检测加速度和旋转)的输入与来自视觉系统的输入不一致。这些毒素在我们进化的过去一定是一个重大问题,因为明智的大自然已经编程让我们的大脑在发生这种情况时呕吐,从而挽救了我们的生命。问题是,毒素并不是导致这种脱节的唯一原因——在车里看书、玩旋转木马和参与某些 VR 体验都会产生同样的效果。目前,AR 体验不太可能引起晕动症,因为它们不太可能向我们的视野外缘提供错误信息,而大脑正是通过视野外缘来记录运动。但是,随着 AR 技术的发展和视野的扩大,它也将能够触发这种神经毒物控制机制。

When you think about it, the phenomenon of motion sickness is incredibly strange. A person is confronted with unusual motion (say, that of a boat, car, or roller coaster), or the appearance of motion (say, an IMAX movie, or a VR car race), and their body responds by becoming gradually more nauseous, and possibly, ultimately vomiting. Why vomiting? Why not sneezing, or getting chills, or feeling tingly, or any other number of possible physiological responses? Why any response at all? The answer is known as the “toxicology hypothesis.” Certain poisons (from some mushrooms, for example) can disrupt the neurology of the brain such that the input from the little hairs in our inner ear (which detect acceleration and rotation) do not align with the input from our visual system. These poisons must have been a significant problem sometime in our evolutionary past, because wise old nature has programmed our brains to vomit when this happens, saving our lives. The problem is that poisons are not the only way to cause this disconnect—reading in the car, riding the Tilt-a-Whirl, and engaging in certain VR experiences can do the same thing. AR experiences, at present, are less likely to cause motion sickness, because they are less likely to give false information to the outer edges of our visual field, which is what the brain uses to register motion. But, as AR technology advances with a wider field of view, it too will be able to trigger this neurological poison control mechanism.

我们能以某种方式破坏这种机制吗?某些药物(例如晕动素)就是这样的,但正如斯伯丁·格雷曾经在谈到使用药物来抑制特定大脑活动时所说,“精确轰炸是不存在的”,这些药物往往会让玩家感到昏昏欲睡和心不在焉。有一天(我猜是 2060 年左右),我们可能会有某种纳米技术可以安全地平息我们的晕动症回路,而不会产生副作用,但在此之前,我们必须忍受它。引发晕动症的具体原因因人而异,但通过遵循这些技巧,可以创造没有“运动不适”的良好体验。

Can we disrupt this mechanism somehow? Certain drugs (Dramamine, for example) do just that, but as Spalding Gray once noted about using drugs to disable specific brain activities, “there is no such thing as precision bombing,” and these drugs tend to make players feel drowsy and disconnected. One day (around 2060 or so, by my guess), we’ll probably have some kind of nanotechnology that can safely calm our motion sickness circuit without side effects, but until then, we have to live with it. Exactly what triggers motion sickness differs vastly from person to person, but it is possible to create great experiences with no “motion discomfort” by following these tips.

  1. 保持帧速率较高。将 60 帧每秒 (fps) 视为新的绝对可接受最小值。90 fps 或更高应该是您的目标。是的,我知道这很难。是的,我知道硬件平台是可变的。我不在乎。您的头部和眼睛可以移动得非常快,当您的帧速率远低于这些高帧速率时,您的大脑就会开始感觉到有些不对劲。有些人不同意,坚持认为大脑甚至无法检测到如此高帧速率之间的差异 - 该电影已证明 24 fps 已经足够。如果您有这种感觉,请尝试这个实验。一天晚上走到荧光路灯下,将一个球抛向空中。路灯每秒脉冲 50-60 次。如果您只是看着灯,它似乎一直亮着。但如果您看着球,您可以清楚地看到单个光脉冲。但您甚至不必走到外面。拿起您的 PC 鼠标,前后摇晃,并观察光标。您的屏幕可能以 60 fps 的速度更新 - 您可以清楚地看到离散位置。大脑感知运动的方式并不简单或容易。在新的 VR 世界中,低于 60 fps 的帧速率已不再可行。

  2. Keep the framerate up. Consider 60 frames per second (fps) your new absolute acceptable minimum. 90 fps or more should be your goal. Yes, I know this is hard. Yes, I know that hardware platforms are variable. I don’t care. Your head and eyes can move quite fast, and when you are much below these high frame rates, your brain starts to sense something is wrong. Some people disagree, insisting that the brain can’t even detect the differences between such high frame rates—that film has established that 24 fps is plenty. If you feel this way, try this experiment. Go out under a fluorescent streetlight one night, and toss a ball in the air. The streetlight is pulsing at 50–60 times a second. If you just look at the light, it seems to be continuously on. But if you look at the ball, you can clearly see the individual light pulses. But you don’t even have to go outside. Pick up your PC mouse and shake it back and forth, and watch your cursor. Your screen is likely updating at 60 fps—and you can clearly see the discrete positions. The way the brain perceives motion is not simple or easy. In the new world of VR, frame rates below 60 fps are no longer feasible.

  3. 避免虚拟摄像机移动。我知道。你想制作第一人称射击游戏,你想制作赛车游戏,你想在太空中进行混战。所有这些都需要一个虚拟摄像机在各个地方飞驰,而真实相机(玩家的眼睛)保持静止。那么,猜猜怎么着?只要眼睛和内耳的毛发之间出现脱节,玩家就会感到恶心。所以,没错,这意味着很多游戏玩法都无法实现。不过请记住,尽管 VR 带走了一切,但它也带来了一些以前无法实现的新事物。能够在环境中移动头部和身体,即使是很短的距离,也是一种不可思议的体验,就像用真实的手操纵虚拟物体一样。在 VR 的框架范围内进行设计需要一些创造力,但如果你愿意这样做,你可以创造出几乎没有晕动症的强大体验。这并不是说具有空间运动的 VR 体验无法实现——这只是意味着你在创建它们时要承担风险,你必须付出额外的努力才能让玩家获得舒适的体验。

  4. Avoid virtual camera movement. I know. You want to make a first person shooter, you want to make a racing game, you want to have a dogfight in space. All of these require a virtual camera that whizzes all over the place while the real camera (the player’s eye) stays still. Well, guess what? Any time you create a disconnect between the eye and those little hairs in the inner ear, your player can become nauseated. So, yes, that means a lot of kinds of gameplay are off the table. Keep in mind, though, that for everything that VR takes away, it gives something new that couldn’t be done before. Being able to move your head and body through an environment, even for a short distance, is an incredible experience, as is manipulating virtual objects with your real hands. It requires some creativity to design within the bounds of the VR box, but if you are willing to do it, you can create powerful experiences that have just about zero motion sickness. This isn’t to say that VR experiences with spatial motion are off the table—it just means that you take a risk when you create them, and you must work extra hard to give your players a comfortable experience.

  5. 如果必须移动相机,请不要加速。耳朵里的那些小毛发很有趣——它们只能检测到加速度,而不是速度。它们无法区分以每小时 80 英里的速度在高速公路上飞驰和一动不动地坐着。它们能注意到的是加速和减速。上世纪 90 年代末,当我为 DisneyQuest的阿拉丁魔毯 VR 冒险编写运动系统时,我利用了这一事实,将地毯的运动编程为尽可能线性。然而,一定程度的加速度是必要的,因此,一些晕动症是不可避免的。然而,这种加速度非常有限,因为体验有五分钟的计时器,大多数人可以忍受五分钟的轻度虚拟运动而不会感到太多不适。然而,对于家庭游戏来说,五分钟通常不是一个可以接受的持续时间。家庭玩家想要一次玩一个多小时的 VR 体验并不罕见,晕动症会产生累积效应。

  6. If you must move the camera, don’t accelerate. Funny thing about those little hairs in your ears—they can only detect acceleration, not velocity. They can’t tell the difference between zipping down the highway at 80 miles per hour, and sitting perfectly still. What they notice is speeding up and slowing down. When I coded up the locomotion system for Aladdin’s Magic Carpet VR Adventure at DisneyQuest in the late nineties, I took advantage of this fact by programming the motion of the carpet to be as linear as possible. Some amount of acceleration was necessary, though, and as a result, some motion sickness was inevitable. It was very limited, however, because the experience is on a five-minute timer, and most people can endure five minutes of mild virtual motion without much discomfort. For home play, however, five minutes is generally not an acceptable duration. It is not uncommon for home players to want to keep playing VR experiences for over an hour at a time, and motion sickness can have a cumulative effect.

  7. 隐藏边缘。你有没有坐在公共汽车或火车上,突然有一种运动的感觉,但抬头一看,却发现你的车根本没有动,而是旁边的车在动?产生这种运动感的原因是我们的大脑使用视野边缘来决定我们如何移动。聪明的 VR 开发人员已经意识到,如果他们用通常所说的“晕影”隐藏视野边缘,就可以显著减少运动不适感。第一款使用这种技术的商业游戏是Eagle's Flight。这种技术并不是万能的,因为有时它会分散玩家的注意力,从而破坏临场感。但要在正确的时间使用它,比如当玩家全神贯注于向特定位置移动时,玩家甚至没有注意到它在那里。

  8. Hide the edges. Have you ever been sitting on a bus or train, and suddenly had a feeling of motion, only to look up and realize that your vehicle is not moving at all, but rather the one next to you is? The reason for this sensation of motion is that our brain uses the edges of our visual field to decide how we are moving. Clever VR developers have realized that if they hide the edges of the visual field with what is commonly called a “vignette” they can significantly reduce feelings of motion discomfort. The first commercial game to use this technique was Eagle’s Flight. This technique is not a cure-all, as there are times when it can distract players, thus breaking presence. But use it at the right time, such as when players are intensely focused on moving toward a specific location, and players don’t even notice it is there.

  9. 谨慎传送。由于虚拟运动会导致晕动症,因此传送是一种显而易见的旅行选择——它能让你快速到达目的地,而且不会引起晕动症——完美,对吧?不幸的是,不是。令人惊讶的是,传送会严重破坏存在感。你的大脑创造存在感的方式似乎是通过构建你周围空间的心理 3D 模型。但只有你看过那个空间,它才能做到这一点。这是一个微妙的事情,但每个人每次按下传送按钮,你都会把自己带到一个你没有存在感的地方,除非你花时间观察周围的环境,否则你不会恢复存在感。所以,虽然传送确实可以防止晕动症,但从体验上讲,它会削弱存在感,而存在感正是我们最需要保留的东西。套用《神秘博士》的话,这是一种廉价而肮脏的太空旅行方式。

  10. Teleport sparingly. Since virtual motion can cause motion sickness, an obvious choice of travel is teleportation—it gets you there quickly, and causes no motion sickness—perfect, right? Unfortunately, no. Surprisingly, teleportation can be a significant presence breaker. It seems the way your mind creates the illusion of presence is by building a mental 3D model of the space around you. But it can only do this if you have looked at that space. It is a subtle thing, but each time you press that teleport button, you take yourself to place where you have no presence, and you won’t get the presence back until you spend time looking at your surroundings. So, while teleportation does prevent motion sickness, experientially it saps away presence, the very thing we most need to preserve. To paraphrase Doctor Who, it is a cheap and nasty form of space travel.

  11. 无论你做什么,都要保持地平线水平。某些类型的运动,无论是虚拟的还是真实的,都是触发晕动症报警电路的捷径。以“桶滚”方式滚动摄像机,使地平线在玩家眼前翻滚,这是导致恶心的最快捷径。所以不要那样做。控制所有这些的内耳管是圆形的,非常擅长检测旋转,因此,通常应避免任何形式的虚拟旋转(摄像机独立于玩家的头部旋转)。VR 的独特之处部分在于它可以让玩家真正转身——真的!使用真实旋转让玩家环顾环境,并尽可能避免虚拟旋转。

  12. And whatever you do, keep the horizon level. Certain kinds of motion, virtual or real, are shortcuts to trigger your motion sickness alarm circuit. Rolling the camera in a “barrel roll” style, so that the horizon does cartwheels in front of the player’s eyes, is the quickest shortcut to nausea city. So—don’t do that. The canals in your inner ear that control all this are circular and very good at detecting rotation, so, generally, you should avoid virtual rotation (where the camera rotates separately from the player’s head) of any kind. Part of what makes VR unique is that it lets players really turn around—for real! Use real rotation to let players look around an environment, and avoid virtual rotation whenever possible.

认真对待晕动症问题非常重要。它不仅会破坏您精心打造的体验,还会产生深远的影响。大多数人都曾有过吃过某种食物后感到恶心的痛苦经历,结果发现几年甚至几十年后,看到或想到这种食物仍然会让他们身体不适。大脑非常重视毒药控制,如果玩家的潜意识开始相信你的游戏有毒,玩家就会在余生中避开它们,因为他们一想到它们就会感到恶心。

It is very important to take the problem of motion sickness seriously. Not only can it disrupt the experience you are so lovingly trying to create, it can have much more far reaching effects. Most people have had a traumatic experience with some food that makes them nauseous, only to find that years and decades later, the sight or thought of that food still makes them physically ill. The mind takes poison control very seriously, and if your players’ subconscious minds come to believe that your games are toxic, players will avoid them for the rest of their lives, because they get sick to their stomach just thinking about them.

破坏存在感的因素 #2:违反直觉的互动

Presence Breaker #2: Counter-Intuitive Interactions

当然,在我们制作的任何游戏中,我们都希望交互清晰直观,但在 VR 中,风险要高得多。令人困惑或违反直觉的物理交互会立即破坏临场感。而在 VR 中,玩家交互与现实相符的重要性远高于基于屏幕的游戏。例如,在传统的冒险游戏中,物品通常是单项任务:螺丝刀仅用于拧螺丝,没有其他用途。刀子仅用于切割,没有其他用途。这是一种“钥匙和锁”的心态。但当临场感占据主导地位,你的身体认为虚拟世界是真实的,互动就会更加丰富。在 Schell Games,我们开发了一款名为I Expect You To Die的间谍主题 VR 游戏,其中包含一个谜题,你需要拧开汽车控制台上的面板。我们将螺丝刀放在视线范围内,我们完全希望玩家会用它来完成这个目的。然而,我们发现许多玩家试图用他们在手套箱里找到的小刀拧开面板。这让我们很惊讶,因为我们把这看得太像传统的无存在感冒险游戏了。另一方面,我们的玩家体验到了存在感,因为他们在现实世界中可能会用刀当螺丝刀,所以这似乎很完美在游戏中这样做很自然。最初,这种做法默默地失败了,而且确实破坏了沉浸感。如果要让玩家用刀拧开面板,我们就必须彻底改变谜题结构,因此我们最终添加了旁白的对话:“我见过你用刀做很多有创意的事情,但我认为拧螺丝不在其中。”这有点像逃避,仍然会破坏玩家的存在感,但至少它承认了玩家的尝试,并要求他们转向其他事情。其他互动我们处理得更好:用枪射击香槟酒瓶会打碎它,破碎的玻璃可以用来切割东西。用打火机点燃钱会使它燃烧。玩家喜欢将物体用在其他物体上——如果你能真实地处理这些互动,你会让他们感到高兴。如果你做不到,你会提醒他们这“只是一场游戏”,并破坏他们的存在感。找到这些深度互动的唯一方法是通过重复的游戏测试。创建一个具有丰富、自然的物体交互的小游戏比创建一个具有较弱的、会破坏存在感的交互的大游戏要明智得多。

Of course, in any game we create, we want interactions to be clear and intuitive, but in VR, the stakes are much higher. A physical interaction that is confusing or counter-intuitive will break presence in an instant. And in VR, the importance of player interactions matching reality is much higher than in a screen-based game. For example, in a traditional adventure game, objects are often uni-taskers: screwdrivers are for unscrewing and nothing else. Knives are for cutting and nothing else. It is a sort of “key and lock” mentality. But when the phenomenon of presence takes over, and your body thinks the virtual world is real, a great deal more richness of interaction is expected. At Schell Games, we developed a spy-themed VR game called I Expect You To Die that contains a puzzle where you need to unscrew a panel from a car’s console. We placed screwdrivers within sight, which we fully expected players to use for this purpose. However, we found many players tried to unscrew the panel using a pocketknife they found in a glovebox. This surprised us, because we were thinking about this too much like a traditional presence-free adventure game. Our players, on the other hand, who were experiencing presence felt that since they might use a knife as a screwdriver in the real world, it seemed perfectly natural to do so in the game. Initially, this silently failed, and it was a real immersion breaker. Allowing players to unscrew the panel with a knife would require us to radically change our puzzle structure, so ultimately we added a dialogue line from our narrator: “I’ve seen you do many creative things with a knife, but I don’t think turning screws will be among them.” This is kind of a cop out, and still a mild presence breaker, but at least it acknowledges the player’s attempt, and asks them to move on to something else. Other interactions we handled better: shooting the champagne bottle with the gun shatters it, and the broken glass can be used to cut things. Lighting the money on fire with the lighter causes it to burn. Players love using objects on other objects—if you can handle these interactions realistically, you will delight them. If you don’t, you’ll remind them this is “just a game,” and break their presence. The only way to find these deep interactions is through repetitive playtesting. It is much wiser to create a small game with rich, natural object interactions than a big game with weak ones that will destroy presence.

破坏存在感的因素 #3:强度过大

Presence Breaker #3: Intensity Overload

许多玩家渴望刺激和激烈的动作——这些都是游戏中重要的乐趣。而 VR 是实现这些乐趣的有效方式。但一些设计师未能意识到 VR 可以带来多大的刺激。我们的大脑中有一个特殊的核,负责注意靠近我们身体的物体。让某人将手放在你的脸附近(这不适用于你自己的手),你可以感觉到那个核被激活了。传统电子游戏无法激活那个核,但 VR 和 AR 可以。我们最大的恐惧很多都与发生在我们身上的坏事有关,而 VR 可以用来让玩家感觉这些事情真的发生了!VR 可以让你感觉你的身体从高处坠落,就像你溺水了一样,就像蜜蜂在你周围蜂拥而至,就像可怕的怪物在触摸你一样。这些事情可能令人兴奋和激动,但它们也可能让人难以抗拒,以至于人们想摘下耳机,停止这种体验。当有人认为“这太过分了——我希望这一切停止”时,你就已经失去他们了,因为他们的内心正在悄悄重复,就像父母对孩子一样,“这只是假装......这只是假装......”这意味着你的玩家的思想正在积极对抗你如此小心翼翼地创造的存在感。

Many players crave thrill and intense action—these are important pleasures in games. And VR is a powerful way to deliver these things. But some designers fail to realize how much more intense VR can be. We have a special nucleus in our brain that is responsible for paying attention to objects that come close to our bodies. Ask someone to put their hand near your face (it doesn’t work with your own hand), and you can feel that nucleus turn on. Traditional videogames cannot activate that nucleus, but VR and AR can. Many of our greatest fears involve bad things happening to our bodies, and VR can be used to make players feel like these things are really happening! VR can make you feel like your body is falling from a great height, like you are drowning, like bees are swarming around you, like creepy monsters are touching you. These things can be thrilling and exciting, but they can also be so overwhelming that people want to rip off the headset and stop the experience. The moment someone thinks “this is too much – I want this to stop,” you have already lost them, because their inner voice is quietly repeating, like a parent to a child, “it’s only pretend… it’s only pretend…” which means your player’s mind is actively fighting against the presence you are trying so carefully to create.

破坏临场感的因素 #4:不真实的音频

Presence Breaker #4: Unrealistic Audio

如果我拿起一枚虚拟硬币,握在手中,翻转硬币,看看硬币的正反面,如果它看起来很逼真,我可能会真正沉浸在我正在做的事情中。但如果我把它扔在地上,它没有发出任何声音,我就会想起这个世界是假的,我的存在感被摧毁了。相反,如果它在鹅卵石街道上弹跳时发出逼真的“叮”和“叮”的声音,我的存在感就会保持下去。声音与触觉密切相关,因此你的大脑会利用声音来判断你的身体在哪里。换句话说,听觉就是信念。

If I pick up a virtual coin and hold it in my hand, turning it over to look at front and back, I might be really immersed in what I’m doing if it looks realistic. But if I then drop it, and it makes no sound, I’ll be reminded that the world is fake, and my presence is destroyed. If instead, it makes realistic “ping” and “ching” noises as it bounces around on the cobblestone street, my presence will be maintained. Sound is closely related to touch, and so your mind uses your sense of sound to decide where your body is. Put another way, hearing is believing.

存在感破坏者 #5:本体感受断开

Presence Breaker #5: Proprioceptive Disconnect

本体感觉不仅仅是身体所在位置的感觉,也是身体所处位置的感觉;例如,你意识到自己是坐着还是站着,或者一只脚交叉在另一只脚上。在基于屏幕的电子游戏中,我们的本体感觉无关紧要。在虚拟现实中,让我们的真实身体和虚拟身体相匹配是保持临场感的关键。如果你坐着玩虚拟现实游戏,而游戏中的角色会在房间里走动,你的身体会认为这是假的,临场感就会被破坏。光是比例就会让你的身体感到困惑:如果你的身体是坐着的,但你的虚拟头离地面六英尺,你的身体和大脑就会感觉到你在飘浮,或者这个世界很小,因为,即使你正和高个子成年人四目相对,你的身体也知道,如果你站起来,你就相当于八英尺高!你的大脑知道这是不可能的,所以它会产生一种奇怪的感觉,觉得周围的一切都很小。

Proprioception is more than your sense of where your body is located, it also is your sense of how your body is positioned; your awareness that you are sitting or standing, for example, or that one foot is crossed over the other. In a screen-based videogame, our proprioceptive sense is irrelevant. In VR, making our real and virtual bodies match is key to maintaining presence. If you are seated while playing a VR game that involves your character walking about a room, your body perceives it as fake, and presence is broken. The scale alone is confusing to your body: if your physical body is seated, but your virtual head is six feet off the ground, your body and mind can perceive either that you are floating, or that the world is very small, for, even though you are looking at tall adults eye to eye, your body knows that if you stood up, you’d be the equivalent of eight feet tall! Your mind knows this isn’t possible, so it can create the strange feeling that everything around you is small.

另一种本体感受脱节涉及物体穿透玩家的身体——例如穿过虚拟桌子。玩家不喜欢虚拟物体穿透他们的身体。一开始会感到不安,因为你的思想和身体在潜意识的恐惧中挣扎,但很快它就会打破存在感。导致本体感受脱节的最快方法是让玩家看到他们能看见的笨拙的虚拟身体。如果你对身体的视觉与本体感受不同(那些假手或假脚的位置与你真实的手或脚的位置不同),你的大脑很快就会拒绝现实是假的。最好不要显示任何身体(出于某种原因,你的大脑并不介意这一点),而不是显示稍微不合适的身体。请将此视为 VR 化身的恐怖谷。

Another type of proprioceptive disconnect involves objects penetrating the player’s body—walking through a virtual table, for example. Players do not like having their bodies penetrated by virtual objects. It feels disconcerting at first, as your mind and body struggle in subconscious fear, but soon it simply breaks presence. The fastest way to bring about a proprioceptive disconnect is to give players awkward virtual bodies that they can see. If visual sense of your body differs from your proprioceptive sense (those fake hands or feet aren’t positioned where your real ones are) your mind quickly rejects the reality as fake. Much better to show no body (your brain doesn’t mind this much, for some reason) than a body slightly out of place. Consider this the uncanny valley of VR avatars.

破坏存在感的因素#6:缺乏身份认同

Presence Breaker #6: Lack of Identity

临场感是一种无处不在的身处某处的感觉。但要想身处某处,你必须是某个人。临场感和身份是紧密相连的。VR 电影制作人往往无法理解这一点。如果有人制作了一部两个人坐在桌边交谈的屏幕电影,我们观看时,会觉得这很正常。我们习惯于将屏幕媒体视为一种漂浮的眼睛,在演员看不见的场景中来回移动。但如果用 VR 拍摄同一部电影,突然间你的身体就出现在了现场,你会开始疑惑:“为什么这两个人无视我?难道他们看不到我就在这里吗?”当然,你在这个世界上的存在感会让你立刻怀疑自己在这个世界上的身份。如果不能解决玩家身份的问题,玩家就会不断想起他们并不真的在那里。

Presence is the pervasive sense of being somewhere. But to be somewhere you must be someone. Presence and identity are closely entwined. VR filmmakers often fail to understand this. If someone make a screen-based movie of two people talking at a table, and we watch it, it seems quite normal. We are used to screen-based media being a sort of floating eye that flits around scenes invisible to the actors. But if the same movie is filmed with VR, suddenly your body is present, and you start to wonder, “Why are these two people ignoring me? Can’t they see I’m right here?” and of course, your presence in the world immediately makes you wonder about your identity in the world. Failing to address the question of the player’s identity will be a nagging reminder to the player that they aren’t really there.

六大存在构建者

Six Presence Builders

虽然从你的经历中去除所有可以消除存在感的因素非常重要,但这还不够。存在感不会凭空而来。就像只用火石和火绒生火一样,存在感必须耐心地培养和鼓励。这六种技巧可以提供帮助。

While it is very important to remove all the presence breakers that you can from your experience, it is not enough. Presence doesn’t just happen. Like starting a fire with only flint and tinder, presence must be patiently fostered and encouraged. These six techniques can help.

存在感构建器 #1:手部存在感

Presence Builder #1: Hand Presence

因为 VR 和 AR 是身体技术,而不仅仅是眼睛技术,所以我们在这些体验中使用身体的方式非常重要。而人类与世界互动的主要方式是用双手。还记得我们对游戏的定义吗?“满足好奇心的操纵”。操纵这个词本身来自拉丁语“manus”,意思是手。看到自己的手是非常特别的体验。“清醒梦”是指意识到自己在做梦,但仍然继续体验梦境的不寻常体验。这对我们大多数人来说都很难,因为当我们意识到自己在做梦时,我们的梦境往往会很快消失。当热衷于清醒梦的人意识到自己在做梦时,他们用来稳定梦境的一种常见技巧是盯着梦中的手。看到自己的手似乎会让大脑相信这个世界是坚实而真实的。同样,VR 和 AR 体验之间也存在着天壤之别,前者只涉及观察世界,而后者可以伸手触摸世界。这种效果非常强烈,因此 VR 开发人员经常提到“手部临场感”的力量。某种手部追踪对于手部临场感的实现必不可少,但这还不够。当玩家能够有意义且自然地操纵周围环境时,手部临场感最强烈、最佳。这需要大量周到的设计,以及对思维和手之间关系的深刻理解。例如,在使用工具时,思维不再考虑手,而是转向手握住的工具的尖端。精明的 VR 设计师已经意识到,这意味着在使用工具时让手不可见是可以接受的。你能说出哪些 VR 体验使用和不使用此技术吗?大多数玩家都记不住,因为他们根本没有注意到他们的手已经变得不可见了。

Because VR and AR are technologies of the body, and not just the eyes, the way we use our bodies during these experiences is very important. And the main way that humans interact with the world is with their hands. Remember our definition of play? “Manipulation that satisfies curiosity.” The very word “manipulate” comes from the Latin word “manus,” which means hand. There is something about seeing one’s own hands that is very special. “Lucid dreaming” is the name for the unusual experience of realizing you are dreaming, yet continuing to experience your dream. This is hard for most of us, for when we realize we are dreaming, our dreams tend to quickly fade. When avid lucid dreamers realize they are dreaming, a common technique they use to stabilize the dream state is to stare at their dream hand. Something about seeing one’s own hand seems to convince the mind that the world is solid and real. Similarly, there is a world of difference between VR and AR experiences that involve just looking at a world, and those where you can reach out and touch it. The effect is so strong that VR developers often refer to the power of “hand presence.” Hand tracking of some kind is a must for hand presence to happen, but it is not enough. The strongest and best hand presence occurs when the player is able to meaningfully and naturally manipulate the environment around them. This requires a lot of thoughtful design, and a deep understanding of the relationship between the mind and the hands. For example, when using a tool, the mind no longer thinks of the hands—the mind goes to the tip of the tool the hands are holding. Savvy VR designers have realized that this means it is acceptable to make hands invisible when a tool is in use. Can you name which VR experiences do and don’t use this technique? Most players can’t remember, because they simply don’t notice their hands have become invisible.

存在感构建器 #2:社交存在感

Presence Builder #2: Social Presence

人类是社会性动物,我们的大脑很大一部分专门用于处理人的面部表情和手势。VR 和 AR 能够创造一种特殊的通信方式,这种通信方式比基于屏幕的视频通话更自然,因为它能让人感觉到另一个人的存在。在 VR 和 AR 中,能够与他人自然地交谈和做手势是一种非常特殊的体验,随着联网头戴设备的数量不断增加,这种体验将变得相当普遍千万。即使是一个简单的音频电话也能创造一种临场感,因为你感觉自己与那个远方的人处于某种社交空间中。通过眼神交流和看到与我在同一空间中的另一个人的手势和动作而产生的临场感,在很大程度上使空间和那个人看起来真实……如果我们可以来回传递物品,那就更好了。

Humans are social creatures, and a significant amount of our brain is dedicated to processing human faces and gestures. VR and AR have the power to create a special kind of telecommunication, one that feels more natural than a screen-based video call, because of the feeling of presence of another person. Being able to speak and gesture naturally with someone else in VR and AR is a very special experience, one that will become quite common when the number of connected headsets rises over ten million. Even a simple audio phone call creates a form of presence, as you feel you are in a sort of social space with that remote person. The presence created by making eye contact and seeing the gestures and movements of another person in the same space with me goes a long way to making a space, and that person, seem real… and if we can hand objects back and forth, all the better.

存在感构建器 #3:熟悉感

Presence Builder #3: Familiarity

还记得我们说过,为了感受到临场感,你必须环顾周围环境,这样你的大脑才能为它建立一个内部 3D 模型吗?这只有当你身处陌生的地方时才是正确的。如果呈现在你面前的是一个熟悉的地点,比如车内、快餐柜台或篮球场,如果这些地方对你来说已经很熟悉,你的大脑就会在你不注意的情况下填充细节,从而很快建立临场感。正如我们所讨论的,游戏中的新颖性非常重要——但给予适当的熟悉感,尤其是在你周围的环境中,可以给人一种令人惊讶的强烈临场感。

Remember how we said that in order to feel presence, you must look around your environment so that your mind can build an internal 3D model of it? That is only true when you are in an unfamiliar place. If a familiar location is presented to you, such as a car interior, a fast food counter, or a basketball court, if these types of places are already familiar to you, your brain will fill out the details without you even looking, building presence quite quickly. As we’ve discussed, novelty in games is very important—but giving the right amount of familiarity, especially in your immediate surroundings, can give a feeling of presence that is surprisingly strong.

Presence Builder #4:逼真的音频

Presence Builder #4: Realistic Audio

无论您通常在游戏中进行多少声音设计和集成,在 VR 体验中都要加倍努力,因为需要付出更多的声音设计努力才能使与物体的交互看起来更逼真。部分原因是空间化声音(声音来自特定位置的错觉)在 VR 中非常重要,也是因为逼真的声音非常具有情境性。声音在小房间和大房间中的回声不同。碰撞声音尤其具有情境性。将硬币掉落在木桌上和掉落在玻璃桌上的声音非常不同。在基于屏幕的电子游戏中,这种差异可能会被忽视 - 但在 VR 中,正确处理这些细节对于建立临场感大有裨益。

Whatever amount of sound design and integration you normally do on a game, expect to double it for a VR experience, because so much more sound design effort is required to make interactions with objects seem realistic. Partly this is because spatialized sound (the illusion that sounds are coming from a particular location) is powerful and important in VR, but also because realistic sound is very contextual. Sounds echo differently in a small room than they do in a large one. Collision sounds are especially contextual. Dropping a coin on a wooden table sounds very different than dropping it onto a glass one. In a screen-based videogame, the difference might go unnoticed—but in VR, getting these details right does a huge amount to build up presence.

存在感构建器 #5:本体感受校准

Presence Builder #5: Proprioceptive Alignment

本体感受的断开会降低临场感,但本体感受的调整(即真实身体和虚拟身体的高度调整)对营造临场感大有裨益。在《我料你死》中,我们为坐着的玩家设计了游戏,因此我们开发了坐姿场景(坐在桌前、坐在车里),这在很大程度上增强了临场感。许多游戏都在尝试新颖的方法来提供强大的本体感受调整,例如射箭游戏中,箭会存放在你背上的箭筒中。为了得到一支新箭,你必须伸手越过肩膀去抓它——这是一个非常自然且符合本体感受的动作。随着技术的进步,脚部和全身追踪成为常态,本体感受调整将变得更加重要,并可带来更强的临场感。

Proprioceptive disconnects degrade presence, but proprioceptive alignment, where your real-life body and virtual body are strongly aligned, does a great deal to build presence. In I Expect You To Die, we designed the game for seated players, and so we developed seated scenarios (sitting at a desk, sitting in a car) and it did a great deal to strengthen presence. Many games have been experimenting with novel ways to give strong proprioceptive alignment, such as archery games where your arrows are stored in a quiver on your back. In order to get a new arrow, you must reach over your shoulder and grab it—a very natural and proprioceptively aligned action. As technologies improve, and foot and full-body tracking become the norm, proprioceptive alignment will be even more important, and lead to even stronger presence.

风采构建者 #6:喜剧

Presence Builder #6: Comedy

这听起来很奇怪,但在喜剧世界里建立存在感要比在严肃的世界里容易得多。《作业模拟器》是一款早期的 VR 游戏,讲述的是玩家在各种工作环境中完成一些愚蠢的任务,它的成功就说明了这一点。在卡通喜剧世界里,你不会指望一切都顺利。事实上,发现这个世界的疯狂规则也是乐趣的一部分!在《作业模拟器》的早期版本中,厨房场景向玩家展示了一把刀和一些蔬菜。自然而然,玩家想要切蔬菜。这将是一个技术上具有挑战性的场景,因为每次切割都必须创建任意大小的几何体。开发人员通过允许一些奇怪的事情发生来避免这个问题。如果玩家试图切蔬菜,刀子会意外地碎成碎片,提供一个怪异的喜剧时刻,并避免问题。在严肃的世界里,这会破坏存在感,因为它显然与现实世界不同。但在一个喜剧世界里,类似这样的怪异事件只能起到强化这个奇怪世界的规则的作用,从而强化玩家的临场感。

It sounds strange, but it is much easier to build presence in a comedic world than in a serious world. The success of Job Simulator, an early VR title all about doing silly tasks in various workplace environments, illustrates the point. In a cartoonish comedy world, you don’t expect everything to work right. In fact, discovering the crazy rules of the world is part of the delight! In an early version of Job Simulator, a kitchen scene presented players with a knife, and some vegetables. Naturally, players wanted to cut the vegetables. This would be a technically challenging scene to develop, because arbitrarily sized geometry would have to be created with each cut. The developers avoided that problem by allowing something strange to happen. If players tried to cut the vegetables, the knife would unexpectedly shatter into pieces, providing a weird comic moment, and avoiding the problem. In a serious world, this would break presence, because it is so obviously unlike the real world. But in a comedy world, weird events like this only serve to reinforce the rules of this strange world, thus reinforcing the player’s sense of presence.

鼓励环顾四周

Encourage Looking Around

早在 1996 年,兰迪·波许 (Randy Pausch) 就对迪士尼的《阿拉丁魔毯 VR 冒险》进行了研究,他指出,刚接触 VR 的玩家都不愿意转头环顾四周。这似乎是因为我们大多数人一生都在接受这样的训练:最好坐着不动、面朝前方,这样才能更好地享受基于屏幕的媒体。除此之外,创建需要玩家环顾周围环境的媒体是一种微妙的艺术形式,许多 VR 设计师都没有做好。此外,许多早期的 VR 体验都采用低帧率(<60 fps),训练玩家如果想避免晕动症,就必须保持头部静止。

As noted as far back as 1996 in Randy Pausch’s study of Disney’s Aladdin Magic Carpet VR Adventure, players new to VR are hesitant to turn their heads and look around. This seems to be because most of us have a lifetime of training that screen-based media is best enjoyed by sitting still and facing forward. On top of that, creating media that requires players to look around their environment is a bit of a subtle art form that many VR designers do not get right. Further, many early VR experiences with low (<60 fps) frame rates trained players to keep their heads still if they wanted to avoid motion sickness.

让玩家有理由四处张望是至关重要的,因为这有助于建立临场感,因为大脑会构建空间的 3D 模型。新玩家一开始不会倾向于这样做。但你可以逐渐引导他们。《我期望你死》通过将玩家置于他们不希望自由移动的地方来实现这一点。如果你的玩家可以向前导航,他们就会向前看。如果你让他们待在原地,他们最终会开始四处张望。《我期望你死》的一个关卡发生在一辆停着的汽车中。玩家坐在驾驶座上。最初,他们会检查前方的东西——方向盘、油门和刹车踏板。当这些都不起作用时,玩家逐渐开始探索汽车:变速杆、手套箱、乘客座位,最终他们会想知道后座上有什么。大多数玩家一旦开始探索汽车,就会对世界的真实性感到惊讶。这似乎是熟悉感和环顾四周共同构建了一种临场感。相反,如果这是一款关于驾驶汽车的游戏,我怀疑这种感觉是否会来得这么快(尽管晕动病很可能会来得这么快)。

Giving the players reasons to look around is critical, as that helps build presence, as the mind builds a 3D model of the space. New players will not be inclined to do so at first. Gradually, though, you can lead them to it. I Expect You To Die does this by putting players into a place where they don’t expect to move around freely. If your players can navigate forward, they want to look forward. If you hold them in place, they eventually start to look around. One level of I Expect You To Die takes place in a parked car. The player is sitting in the driver’s seat. Initially, they examine what is in front of them—the steering wheel, the gas and brake pedals. When these don’t do anything, the player gradually starts to explore the car: the gearshift, the glove box, the passenger seat, and eventually they wonder what is in the back seat. Most players, once they start to explore the car, are startled at how real the world seems. This appears to be familiarity and looking around working together to build a sense of presence. If, instead, this were a game about driving a car, I am doubtful that the presence would arrive so quickly (though motion sickness likely would).

你不仅需要给玩家理由去环顾四周(以及有趣的东西去观看和互动),你还应该给玩家一个观察事物的机会。设计师想要提供帮助,往往会让玩家从起点轻松看到一切。但请记住位置跟踪的力量。在我们的游戏中,我们给玩家提供了许多理由,不仅仅是转身,还有移动头部。多个手套箱、后座上的物品、小字、允许物体掉落在汽车地板上的物理原理,甚至要求你向前倾的视网膜扫描系统(如果你不把头移开,它会试图用激光杀死你)都是我们鼓励玩家在环境中移动头部的不同方式。

Not only do you need to give players reasons to look around (and interesting things to look at and interact with), but you would be wise to give players an opportunity to look into things. Designers, wanting to be helpful, have a tendency to make everything easily visible from the player’s starting point. But keep in mind the power of positional tracking. In our game, we gave players lots of reasons not just to turn, but to move their heads. Multiple glove boxes, items in the back seat, fine print, physics that allows objects to fall onto the floor of the car, and even an retinal scanning system that demands you lean forward (and then tries to kill you with a laser if you don’t move your head out of the way) were all different ways we encouraged players to move their heads around in the environment.

考虑 Brownboxing

Consider Brownboxing

大多数开发人员都明白,当你承担一个有很多未知数的游戏项目时,你必须在计划中留出大量时间来处理发现和问题。VR 和 AR 项目有很多未知数,必然需要时间进行实验和适应。但有趣的是:既然你试图模拟现实,你实际上可以通过在现实中构建你的体验来学到很多东西!Shawn Patton 开创了“brownboxing”技术,即使用一堆旧纸板箱在现实世界中模拟 VR 场景,然后像任何纸质游戏测试一样对其进行游戏测试,让某人充当游戏大师,并告诉你当你触摸、拾起或操纵不同物体时会发生什么。你无法通过这种方式测试所有内容,但你可以快速了解玩家希望如何使用他们的手与场景互动,以及他们可以触及什么。完成 brownbox 迭代后,对其进行测量,将其交给建模者,你将拥有第一个“whiteboxed”数字原型的极好基础。

Most developers understand that when you undertake a game project with a lot of unknowns, you have to leave a lot of time in the schedule to deal with discoveries and problems. VR and AR projects have a lot of unknowns, and necessarily require time for experimentation and adaptation. But, here’s the funny thing: since you are trying to simulate reality, you can actually learn a lot by building your experience… in reality! Shawn Patton pioneered the technique of “brownboxing,” that is, using a bunch of old cardboard boxes to simulate a VR scene in the real world, and then playtesting it the way you would any paper playtest, having someone act as the game master, and telling you what happens as you touch, pick up, or manipulate different objects. You can’t test everything that way, but you can learn a lot quickly about how the player wants to interact with the scene using their hands, and what they can reach. Once your brownbox iteration is complete, measure it, hand it to the modeler, and you’ll have an excellent basis for your first “whiteboxed” digital prototype.



22.3

FIGURE

22.3

肖恩·帕顿 (Shawn Patton) 和马特·马洪 (Matt Mahon) 测试了《我期望你死》 (I Expect You To Die)的潜艇级别。

Shawn Patton and Matt Mahon test the submarine level of I Expect You To Die.

不同的硬件带来不同的体验

Different Hardware Enables Different Experiences

您使用的 VR 和 AR 输入在很大程度上决定了您所创造的体验。仅使用游戏手柄的系统与使用运动跟踪手控制器的系统非常不同,而后者与跟踪空手的系统也非常不同。需要静止站立的系统与让玩家自由走动的系统所创造的体验非常不同。除此之外,在处理能力、音频传输方式和许多其他因素方面也存在巨大差异。

The VR and AR inputs that you use very much define the experience you create. Systems that simply use a gamepad are very different from ones that use motion-tracked hand controllers, which are very different from ones that track your empty hands. Systems that require standing still create very different experiences from ones that give players the freedom to walk around. On top of all this, there are radical differences in the amount of processing power, how audio is delivered, and many other factors.

这将是罕见的可以轻松移植到各种不同 VR 输入系统的 VR 体验。因此,如果您想创造出色的 VR 体验,您应该首先选择您计划使用的输入系统,并围绕该系统设计游戏。是的,这意味着您的游戏可能很难移植到其他平台,但它在您选择的平台上会很棒。

It will be the rare VR experience that can easily be ported to the variety of different VR input systems. As a result, if you want to create a great VR experience, you should first choose the input system you plan to use, and design your game around that. Yes, this will mean your game may be hard to port to other platforms, but it will be great on the platform you have chosen.

还记得透明镜头吗?这是它的好搭档。

Remember the Lens of Transparency? Here’s a good partner for it.

在撰写本文时(2019 年),VR 和 AR 系统才刚刚开始被视为严肃的游戏平台。在撰写本章时,我冒着风险,我在这里所说的可能在几年后听起来都很愚蠢。然而,我认为这些想法值得与你分享,因为虽然 VR 和 AR 系统不太可能成为电子游戏硬件的主导形式,但它们提供的强大临场感让我确信它们会在游戏设计领域中占有永久而重要的地位。尽管它们的形式和技术将迅速发展和变化,但我相信在这些平台上的存在感的重要性将保持不变。

At the time of this writing (2019), VR and AR systems are only beginning to be treated as serious game platforms. By writing this chapter, I take a risk that what I say here may all sound foolish within a few years. However, I decided that these were ideas that are important to share with you, because while it is unlikely that VR and AR systems will become the dominant form of videogame hardware, the powerful experience of presence that they provide makes me certain that they will have a permanent and important place in the world of game design. And though their forms and technology will evolve and change rapidly, I am confident that the importance of presence in these platforms will remain constant.

鉴于存在感受到体验的外观和感觉的极大影响,现在可能是谈论美学的好时机。

Given that presence is so influenced by the look and feel of your experience, this might be a good time to talk about aesthetics.

第二十 三章

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

世界的观感由其美学决定

The Look and Feel of a World Is Defined by Its Aesthetics



23.1

FIGURE

23.1

莫奈拒绝手术

Monet Refuses the Operation

医生,你说没有光环

巴黎的路灯周围

而我看到的却是一种异常

由于年老而引起的一种痛苦。

我告诉你这花费了我一生的时间

到达煤气灯作为天使的景象,

软化、模糊,最终驱逐

我看不到你后悔的边缘,

了解到我称之为地平线的那条线

不存在天空和水,

相隔这么久,却都是一样的状态。

五十四年后我才看到

鲁昂大教堂建成

太阳平行照射,

现在你想恢复

我年轻时犯的错误:已改正

顶部和底部的概念,

三维空间的错觉,

紫藤分开

从它所覆盖的桥梁。

我该说什么才能说服你

议会大厦解散

夜复一夜

泰晤士河流动的梦想?

我不会回到宇宙

互不认识的物体,

仿佛岛屿不是迷失的孩子

一个伟大大陆。世界

是流动的,光接触到什么就会变成什么,

变成水,水上的百合花,

水上和水下,

变成淡紫色、紫红色和黄色

还有白色和天蓝色的灯,

小拳头穿过阳光

如此迅速地互相

需要长而飘逸的头发

在我的画笔里捕捉它。

以光速进行绘画!

我们的加权形状,这些垂直形状,

燃烧与空气混合

改变我们的骨骼、皮肤、衣服

气体。医生,

如果你能看到

天堂如何将地球拉入怀抱

心胸如何无限开阔

宣称这世界,蓝色蒸汽永无止境。

—Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

—Lisel Mueller

美学的价值

The Value of Aesthetics

美学是元素四元组的第三象限。一些游戏设计师鄙视游戏中的美学考虑,称它们只是“表面细节”,与他们认为重要的游戏机制无关。但我们必须始终记住,我们设计的不仅仅是游戏机制,而是一种完整的体验。美学考虑是让任何体验更愉快的一部分。好的艺术作品可以为游戏创造奇妙的效果:

Aesthetics is the third quadrant of the elemental tetrad. Some game designers have disdain for aesthetic considerations in a game, calling them mere “surface details” that have nothing to do with what they consider important—the game mechanics. But we must always remember that we are not designing just game mechanics, but an entire experience. And aesthetic considerations are part of making any experience more enjoyable. Good artwork can do wondrous things for a game:

  • 它可以将玩家吸引到他们可能已经错过的游戏中。

  • It can draw the player into a game they might have passed over.

  • 它可以让游戏世界感觉扎实、真实、宏伟,让玩家更加认真地对待游戏,增加内生价值。请考虑第 9 章玩家“感觉的快感”部分中的轴心国与同盟国的故事。

  • It can make the game world feel solid, real, and magnificent, which makes the player take the game more seriously and increases endogenous value. Consider the axis and allies story in the “pleasure of sensation” section in Chapter 9: Player.

  • 审美愉悦并非小事。如果你的游戏充满了精美的艺术作品,那么玩家看到的每件新事物本身就是一种奖励。

  • Aesthetic pleasure is no small thing. If your game is full of beautiful artwork, then every new thing that the player gets to see is a reward in itself.

  • 强大的游戏世界具有一定的“氛围”。很难准确描述这种氛围,但它是由视觉效果、声音、音乐和游戏机制共同创造的。

  • Powerful game worlds have a certain “atmosphere.” It can be hard to describe what that is, exactly, but it is created by the way the visuals, sounds, music, and game mechanics all work together.

  • 就像世界常常忽略美丽女人或英俊男人的性格缺陷一样,如果您的游戏具有漂亮的外观,玩家也更有可能容忍您设计中的缺陷。

  • Just as the world often ignores character flaws in a beautiful woman or a handsome man, players are more likely to tolerate imperfections in your design if your game has a beautiful surface.

您已经拥有评估游戏美学所需的许多工具。显然,镜头 #71美感很有用,但您也可以通过以新的方式使用这些其他镜头来改善和整合您的美学。停下来思考一下,您可以如何使用这些镜头中的每一个来观察游戏中的艺术作品,而不是游戏机制。

You already have many of the tools you need to evaluate aesthetics in your game. Obviously, Lens #71: Beauty is useful, but you can also improve and integrate your aesthetics by using these other lenses in a new way. Stop for a moment, and consider how you might use each of these lenses not to observe the mechanics of your game, but the artwork in your game.

我们再添加一个。

And let us add one more.

学会观察

Learning to See

从多个角度来看待游戏艺术作品是有意义的,因为创造优秀艺术作品的关键在于观察能力。不仅仅是看到盐瓶并说“这是一个盐瓶”,而是真正地观察它——观察它的形状、颜色、比例、阴影、反射和纹理——观察它与环境和使用者的关系,观察它的功能,观察它的意义。这种深入观察相当于我们在本书开头讨论的深入倾听。

It makes sense to view your game artwork through many lenses, because the key to creating great artwork is in your ability to see. Not just to see a salt shaker and say “that’s a salt shaker,” but to really see it—see its shapes, colors, proportions, shadows, reflections, and textures—to see its relationship to its environment and to the people who use it, and to see its function, and to see its meaning. This kind of deep seeing is a visual equivalent of the deep listening we discussed at the beginning of the book.



23.2

FIGURE

23.2

真正看到事物的本来面目是多么困难,这真是令人惊讶。原因在于效率——如果我们只是敬畏地盯着我们看到的一切,吸收每一个视觉和听觉细节,我们的思想就会如此专注,以至于永远无法完成任何事情。因此,为了提高效率,我们的大脑在低水平上对事物进行分类,然后才进入我们的意识。我们看到一个盐瓶或一只狗,我们的左脑就会给它贴上标签,因为思考标签比真正深入地看到事物本身的所有细节和独特性更容易。当你在游戏中查看和思考艺术作品时,你必须学会​​让你的左脑休息一下,让你的右脑出来玩,因为右脑能够看到左脑看不到的细节。贝蒂·爱德华兹的优秀著作《用右脑绘画》是一本关于这个主题的精彩教材,旨在通过教他们如何看来教任何人绘画。这是一个令人着迷的良性循环——真实的观察可以帮助你正确地绘画,而绘画可以帮助你正确地观察。

It is amazing how difficult it can be to actually see things as they really are. The reason for this is efficiency—if we just stared in awe at everything we saw, taking in every little visual and audible detail, our minds would be so absorbed we would never get anything done. So, for efficiency, our brains, at a low level, categorize things before they enter our consciousness. We see a salt shaker or a dog, and our left brain just slaps a label on it, because it is easier to think about a label than to actually deeply see the thing itself in all its detail and uniqueness. When you are looking at and thinking about artwork in your game, you must learn to get your left brain to take a little break and let your right brain come out and play, for the right brain is able to see details that the left brain cannot. Betty Edwards’ excellent book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, is a marvelous text on this subject that is designed to teach anyone to draw by teaching them how to see. This is a fascinating virtuous circle—really seeing helps you draw properly, and drawing helps you see properly.

如何让美学指导你的设计

How to Let Aesthetics Guide Your Design

有些人错误地认为,在游戏设计接近完成之前,让艺术家参与游戏项目是没有意义的。但我们的思维非常注重视觉效果,而且通常情况下,插图或铅笔素描可以完全改变设计的进程,因为游戏在你脑海中的样子通常与它在纸上画出来的样子大不相同。有时,一幅鼓舞人心的概念艺术作品可以提供游戏试图实现的体验的统一愿景。其他时候,插图可以明确界面创意是否可行。偶尔,为了取笑设计而画的小涂鸦突然变成了游戏的中心主题。游戏设计是抽象的——插图是具体的。在将抽象设计转化为具体游戏的痛苦过程中,插图可以作为一种简单有效的方式,在项目一开始就将设计扎根于现实。

Some people mistakenly believe that it doesn’t make sense to get artists involved in a game project until the game design is near completion. But our minds are very visual, and it is often the case that an illustration or pencil sketch can completely change the course of a design, because the way a game looks in your mind’s eye is often very different from the way it looks when it is drawn on paper. Sometimes, an inspiring piece of concept art can provide the uniting vision of the experience a game is trying to achieve. Other times, an illustration can make clear whether an interface idea is possible or not. And occasionally, a little doodle done as a joke to poke fun at a design suddenly proves to become the central theme of a game. Game designs are abstract—illustrations are concrete. In the painful process of converting your abstract design into a concrete game, illustrations can serve as a simple, effective way to ground your design in reality at the very start of a project.

如果你有一些艺术技能,那么这对你作为游戏设计师来说是一个很大的福音——因为你会画草图,人们会认为你脑海中的创意构想和纸上一样清晰。更重要的是,它可能会让你出名。著名的游戏设计师只有两类:第一类是设计“上帝游戏”的人,比如威尔·赖特、彼得·莫利纽克斯和席德·梅尔,大概是因为人们很容易把一个世界的设计师想象成它的上帝;第二类是具有非常独特视觉风格的设计师,比如宫本茂和亚美利加·麦吉。所以,如果你有独特而吸引人的艺术风格,你应该认真考虑以它为基础来制作你的游戏。

If you have some artistic skill, it can be a great boon to you as a game designer—because you can sketch, people will think your creative vision is as clear in your mind as it is on the paper. More than that, it might make you famous. There are only two categories of famous game designers: first, ones who design “god games,” such as Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, and Sid Meier, presumably because it is easy to imagine a designer of a world as its god; and second, ones who have a very distinct visual style, such as Shigeru Miyamoto and American McGee. So, if you have a distinct and appealing art style, you should seriously consider basing your games around it.

但是,如果你(像我一样)天生没有艺术天赋怎么办?如果你在绘画方面既没有主要天赋也没有次要天赋怎么办?在这种情况下,你能做的最好的事情就是找到一个艺术伙伴。因为如果你能找到一个有才华的艺术家,并且能和他很好地沟通,你的模糊想法很快就会变成一个具体的愿景。这样的伙伴关系可能是黄金,因为一幅漂亮的画是美好的一时之间,一个好主意在理论上是好的,但一个好主意的精心呈现的图像却具有一种很少有人能抗拒的吸引力。具有良好概念艺术的优秀游戏设计将

But what if (like me) artistic talents do not come naturally to you? What if you have neither the major nor minor gift when it comes to drawing? In this case, the best thing you can do is to find an artistic partner. For if you can find a talented artist with whom you communicate well, your nebulous idea can become a concrete vision very quickly. Partnerships like this can be golden, for a pretty picture is nice for a moment and a good idea is nice in theory, but a well-rendered image of a good idea is compelling in a way that few people can resist. Strong game designs that have good concept art will

  • 让每个人都清楚你的想法(你不认为有人会真正阅读你的设计文档,是吗?)

  • Make your idea clear to everyone (you didn’t think anyone would actually read your design document, did you?)

  • 让人们看到并想象进入你的游戏世界

  • Let people see, and imagine entering, your game world

  • 让人们对玩你的游戏感到兴奋

  • Get people excited about playing your game

  • 让人们对开发你的游戏感到兴奋

  • Get people excited about working on your game

  • 让您获得资金和其他资源来开发游戏

  • Allow you to secure funding and other resources to develop your game

现在,你可能会认为在项目开始时就制作一些详细的艺术作品的想法违背了快速原型的想法,因为快速原型中的游戏元素通常是完全抽象的。但事实并非如此——插图只是另一种原型。这几乎就像在玩跷跷板——抽象原型给你游戏外观的想法,这促使你制作更多的概念艺术,而概念艺术可以给你游戏玩法的想法,这促使你制作新的抽象原型。如果你继续这样循环,最终你会得到一个漂亮的游戏,它玩起来很有趣,而且艺术和游戏玩法完美地互补,因为它们是一起成长的。

Now, you might think that the idea of having some detailed art at the beginning of a project goes against the idea of rapid prototyping, where often the game elements are completely abstract. But it isn’t so—an illustration is just another kind of prototype. It is almost like riding a seesaw—the abstract prototype gives you ideas for how the game should look, which drives you to make more concept art, and the concept art can give you ideas for how the game should play, which drives you to make new abstract prototypes. If you keep cycling this way, eventually you will arrive at a beautiful game that is fun to play and in which the artwork and gameplay complement each other perfectly, because they grew up together.

多少才够?

How Much Is Enough?

但这引出了一个重要的问题——概念艺术中多少细节最合适?大多数艺术家都希望他们所做的一切都看起来绝对华丽——但美丽的艺术需要时间,有时粗略的草图或粗糙的模型就足以完成这项工作。尤其是年轻的艺术家,他们害怕画草图并展示它们,因为他们担心粗糙的质量会让人们误判他们的才华。创作简单、粗糙且有用的草图是一项必须练习的宝贵技能。

But this raises an important question—What is the right amount of detail for your concept art? Most artists want to make everything they do look absolutely gorgeous—but beautiful art takes time, and sometimes rough sketches or rough models are enough to do the job. Young artists, especially, are afraid of doing rough sketches and showing them, for they fear that the rough quality will make people misjudge their talent. Creating sketches that are simple, rough, and useful is a valuable skill that must be practiced.

当然,有时也只有华丽的全彩渲染才能展现游戏的真实感觉。我曾经合作过的一位艺术家有一个绝妙的技巧——他会用铅笔画出大而精致的草图,然后挑选图片中的一个关键元素,用全彩、干净的线条和漂亮的阴影渲染它。这是一个奇妙的平衡——观众可以看到他所呈现内容的范围和复杂性,也可以看到完成细节的质量。观众可以轻松想象,如果整个图像完成到那个关键元素的细节水平,它会是什么样子。

But of course, there are other times when only gorgeous full-color renderings will do to show the true feel of the game. One artist I used to work with had a great trick—he would create rough pencil sketches that were large and elaborate, then pick one key element of the picture, and render it with full color, clean lines, and nice shading. This was a marvelous balance—the viewer could see the scope and complexity of what he was presenting but also the quality of finished detail. The viewer could easily imagine what the whole image would look like if it were finished to the level of detail of that one key element.

即使是成品,你也需要谨慎地选择细节,因为在合适的地方添加一些细节可以让你的游戏世界看起来比实际更大、更丰富。迪士尼幻想工程师约翰·亨奇 (John Hench) 经常说,任何人都可以让事物从远处看起来很棒——这是让他们近距离欣赏也同样好看,但近距离欣赏却很难。迪士尼乐园的灰姑娘城堡就是一个例子。人们从远处看到它,并被它吸引,因为它太美了。如果他们走近发现它只是粗糙的玻璃纤维,他们就会大失所望。相反,他们发现近距离欣赏它有华丽的马赛克和精美的石雕,这超出了他们的预期,让它看起来深刻、美丽和真实。

Even in your finished product, you need to be judicious about where to put detail, for a few details in the right places can make your game world seem far larger and richer than it is. John Hench, one of the great Disney Imagineers, would often say that anyone can make things look good from far away—it’s making them also look good close up that is hard. An example is Cinderella’s castle at Disney World. People see it from a distance and are drawn to it because it is so beautiful. If, when they got close, they found it was crudely painted fiberglass, they would be filled with disappointment. Instead, they find that close up it has gorgeous mosaics and beautiful stone crafting, which exceeds their expectations, making it seem deep, beautiful, and real.

JRR 托尔金的世界以深邃和丰富而闻名——他实现这一点的方法之一是通过他称之为“遥远的山脉”的技巧。在他的每一本书中,他都会给书中从未真正遇到过的遥远的地方、人和事件命名。这些名字和简短的描述让世界看起来比实际更大、更丰富。当粉丝问他为什么不添加更多关于这些事情的细节时,他会回答说他可以告诉他们关于遥远山脉的一切,但如果他这样做,他就需要为那些遥远的山脉创造更多的遥远山脉。

J.R.R. Tolkien’s worlds are famous for being deep and rich—one way he achieves this is through a trick he referred to as “distant mountains.” In each of his books, he gives names to distant places, people, and events that are never actually encountered in the book. The names and brief descriptions make it seem like the world is larger and richer than it is. When fans would ask him why he didn’t add more detail about these things, he would reply that he could tell them all about the distant mountains, but if he did that, he’d need to create more distant mountains for those distant mountains.

使用音频

Use Audio

当你考虑游戏的美学时,很容易陷入只考虑视觉艺术的陷阱。但音频却非常强大。音频反馈比视觉反馈更直观,更容易模拟触觉。曾经有一项研究要求两组玩家对游戏的图像进行评分,并且只对图像进行评分。两名玩家玩的是同一款游戏,但有一个区别:第一组玩家使用的是低质量音频,而第二组玩家使用的是高质量音频。令人惊讶的是,尽管两款游戏的图像完全相同,但“高质量音频”组对游戏图像的评分高于“低质量音频”组。

It is very easy to fall into the trap of only thinking of visual art when you think about the aesthetics of your game. But audio can be incredibly powerful. Audio feedback is much more visceral than visual feedback and more easily simulates touch. A study was once performed where two groups of players were asked to rate the graphics of a game and only the graphics. Both players played the same game but for one difference: the first group had low-quality audio, and the second group had high-quality audio. Surprisingly, though the graphics were identical for both games, the “high-quality audio” group rated the graphics of the game more highly than the “low-quality audio” group.

游戏开发者经常犯的一个严重错误就是直到最后才在游戏中添加音乐或声音。第 7 章创意中提到的 Kyle Gabler 技巧值得在此重复。在流程一开始就为你的游戏选择音乐,越早越好——甚至在你了解游戏是什么之前!如果你能选择一段符合你游戏玩法的音乐,那么你已经有效地做出了许多潜意识的决定,决定了你想要的游戏感觉是什么样的,或者换句话说,游戏的氛围。就像主题一样,音乐可以引导游戏的设计——如果你发现游戏的某个部分与你认为正确的音乐相冲突,这是一个很好的迹象,表明游戏的某个部分应该改变。

One serious error that game developers often fall into is to not add music or sound to their game until the very end. The Kyle Gabler technique mentioned in Chapter 7: Idea, bears repeating here. Choose music for your game at the very beginning of your process, as early as possible—possibly before you even know what the game is! If you are able to choose a piece of music that feels the way you want your game to play, you have already efficiently made a great many subconscious decisions about what you want your game to feel like, or in other words, its atmosphere. Like a theme, the music can channel the design of your game—if you ever find that part of your game is conflicting with the music that you feel is so right, it is a good indication that part of the game should change.

平衡艺术与科技

Balancing Art and Technology

现代电子游戏中艺术与技术的紧密结合带来了一些非常具有挑战性的设计问题。艺术家既受到技术的力量,又受到技术的限制,工程师也同样受到技术的力量和限制。受艺术约束。游戏中的很多艺术看起来都是高科技的,因此很容易让工程师自由地创造游戏的艺术愿景——他们往往已经准备好这样做了。不要让这种情况发生!有才华的艺术家经过一生的训练,想象和定义辉煌的、综合的艺术愿景。他们看待世界的方式与我们其他人不同,正如本章开头 Lisel Mueller 的诗如此生动地说明的那样。只要有可能,就让他们驾驶美学巴士。我是说你应该忽视工程师的美学参与吗?绝不!让工程师成为领航员和机械师——让他们推荐新的路线和捷径,让他们改进巴士,但让艺术家决定目的地,让他们的才华横溢的双手引领游戏走向美丽。不要只让工程师加入本月流行的阴影算法——相反,让艺术家绘制和描绘他们想要看到的阴影和纹理,然后挑战工程师来匹配这种愿景。

The tight integration of art and technology in modern videogames makes for some very challenging design problems. The artists are simultaneously empowered by and restrained by technology, and the engineers are similarly empowered and restrained by art. So much of the art in games seems high tech that it is tempting to just let the engineers loose to create the artistic vision of the game—something they are often all too ready to do. Don’t let this happen! Talented artists have trained for a lifetime to imagine and define glorious, integrated artistic visions. They see the world differently from the rest of us, as Lisel Mueller’s poem illustrated so vividly at the start of this chapter. Whenever possible, let them drive the aesthetic bus. Am I saying you should ignore the engineers’ aesthetic participation? By no means! Make the engineers the navigators and mechanics—let them recommend new routes and shortcuts and let them soup up the bus, but let the artists decide the destination and let their talented hands steer the way to a beautiful game. Don’t just let the engineers include whatever shadow algorithm is the flavor of the month—instead, let the artists draw and paint the kind of shadows and textures they would want to see and then challenge the engineers to match that vision.

您应该仔细考虑的一件事是为您的团队寻找一名技术美术师。这个不寻常的人既有艺术家的眼光,又有计算机程序员的头脑。一位有才华的技术美术师能够流利地说这两种语言,并帮助构建工具,让艺术家感觉自己掌握了技术,让工程师感觉自己掌握了艺术,从而在艺术团队和工程团队之间架起桥梁。这种平衡不容小觑——当它不正确时,感觉就像您的游戏从中间断裂了,但当您实现它时,您的游戏将以玩家从未见过的方式变得华丽而强大。

One thing you should consider carefully is finding a technical artist for your team. This unusual individual has the eye of an artist and the mind of a computer programmer. A talented technical artist can build bridges between the art team and the engineering team by being able to fluently speak both of their languages and by helping to build tools that make the artists feel in command of the technology and the engineers feel in command of the art. This balance is not something to be taken lightly—when it is not right, it feels like your game is cracked down the middle, but when you achieve it, your game is gorgeous and powerful in ways your players will have never seen before.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • Josh Jenisch 的《电子游戏的艺术》。这是一部精彩的游戏史,也是对创造一款伟大游戏所需的艺术层次的有趣探讨。

  • The Art of the Videogame by Josh Jenisch. A great history of games as well as an interesting examination of the layers of art needed to create a great game.

  • 《电子游戏的艺术:从吃豆人到质量效应》作者:克里斯·梅利西诺斯和帕特里克·奥罗克。这本史密森尼电子游戏艺术展的配套书提供了一部深刻的电子游戏艺术史。

  • The Art of Videogames: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect by Chris Melissinos and Patrick O’Rourke. This companion book to an exhibition of videogame art at the Smithsonian provides a thoughtful history of video game art.

  • Brian Solarski 著的《绘画基础和电子游戏艺术》。这本书不仅适合艺术家,更是古典艺术和数字艺术之间的绝佳桥梁。

  • Drawing Basics and Videogame Art by Brian Solarski. Not just for artists, this book is an excellent bridge between classical and digital art.

  • 贝蒂·爱德华兹 (Betty Edwards) 著《用右脑绘画》。不会画画?每个人都应该会画画。按照这些说明,你就能学会画画。

  • Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Can’t draw? Everyone should be able to draw. Follow these instructions, and you will learn to draw.

第二十 四章

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

有些游戏是与其他玩家一起玩的

Some Games Are Played with Other Players



24.1

FIGURE

24.1

我们并不孤单

We Are Not Alone

我们应该记住,整个宇宙,除了一个微不足道的例外,都是由其他宇宙组成的。

—约翰·安德鲁·霍姆斯

It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

—John Andrew Holmes

没有人会在临终前说:“哎呀,我希望我能花更多的时间独自使用电脑。”

— 丹尼·邦顿·贝里

No one ever said on their deathbed, “Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.”

—Dani Bunten Berry

人类是社会动物。人类通常尽可能避免独处。在大多数情况下,我们不喜欢独自吃饭、独自睡觉、独自工作或独自玩耍。行为不端的囚犯会被单独监禁,因为虽然与危险罪犯一起被关在笼子里很糟糕,但独处更糟糕。

Man is a social animal. Humans generally avoid being alone whenever possible. In most cases, we don’t like to eat alone, sleep alone, work alone, or play alone. Prisoners who behave badly are put in solitary confinement, because, although being trapped in a cage with a dangerous criminal is bad, being alone is worse.

而且,如果你回顾几个世纪,游戏设计的历史就反映了这一点。大多数游戏都是为与其他玩家一起玩或与其他玩家对抗而设计的。在计算机出现之前,单人游戏(如单人纸牌)很少见。

And, if you look back over the centuries, the history of game design reflects this. The majority of all games created are designed to be played with other players or against other players. Before the advent of computers, solo games, such as solitaire, were rare.

那么电子游戏发生了什么?其中很多都是单人游戏。但为什么呢?是不是因为技术的原因,我们想要放弃人类天生​​的社交倾向?当然不是。事实上,趋势很明显——每年都有更多电子游戏具有某种形式的多人游戏或社区组件。Facebook 游戏和异步社交手机游戏的爆炸式增长是人类本性的一次大爆发。单人游戏现象似乎只是暂时的异常现象,部分原因是单人互动世界的新颖性,部分原因是游戏软件和硬件的技术限制。现在,越来越多的游戏平台开始上线并实现互联,没有多人游戏组件的游戏再次成为罕见的情况。随着技术进步和技术新颖性逐渐消退,电子游戏开始越来越符合人类数千年来的古老社会模式。

So what happened with videogames? A tremendous number of them are single-player experiences. But why? Is there something about the technology that makes us want to give up our natural human tendency to socialize? Of course not. In fact, the trends are clear—each year, more videogames have a multiplayer or community component of some kind. The explosion of Facebook games and asynchronously social mobile games is a massive blossoming of human nature. The single-player phenomenon appears to have been a temporary abnormality, born partly because of the novelty of single-player interactive worlds and partly because of the technological limitations of game software and hardware. Now that more and more game platforms are going online and becoming connected, it is becoming the case that games not featuring a multiplayer component are once again becoming the rare case. The more technology advances and technological novelty wears off, the more electronic games start to fit the ancient social molds humans have had for thousands of years.

这是否意味着有一天将不再有单人游戏?当然不是。人类确实有很多时候想独处一段时间——读书、锻炼、冥想和做填字游戏都是令人愉快的独处乐趣,电子游戏与所有这些都有共同之处。但人类倾向于花更多的时间社交而不是独处,从长远来看,游戏也会这样做。

Does this mean that a day will come when there are no single-player games? Certainly not. There are plenty of times that humans do want to be alone for a time—reading books, exercising, meditating, and doing crossword puzzles are all delightful solitary pleasures, and videogames have elements in common with all of these. But humans tend to spend more time social than solitary, and in the long run, games will do the same.

为什么我们要和别人一起玩

Why We Play with Others

每个人都是一扇半开的门,通向一个属于每个人的房间。

— 托马斯·特朗斯托默

Every person is a half-open door, leading to a room for everyone.

—Tomas Transtomer

显然,与其他人一起玩游戏是自然而然的,事实上,这是我们玩游戏的首选方式。但为什么呢?到目前为止,在这本书中,我们已经讨论了人们玩游戏的几十个原因:为了乐趣、为了挑战、为了判断、为了奖励、为了心流、为了超越等等。虽然其中一些可以通过其他玩家的存在得到增强,但这些都不需要其他玩家的存在。我们在与其他人一起玩游戏时具体寻求的是什么?似乎有五个主要原因:

Clearly, playing with other people is natural and, in fact, the preferred way for us to play games. But why? In this book so far, we have discussed dozens of reasons people play games: for pleasure, for challenge, for judgment, for rewards, for flow, for transcendence, and many more. Although some of those are enhanced by the presence of other players, none of them require that presence. What is it that we specifically seek when playing games with other people? There seem to be five main reasons:

  1. 竞争:当我们想到多人游戏时,我们首先想到的通常是竞争——这是有原因的。它同时满足了我们的多种需求和愿望。同时,它

  2. Competition: When we think of multiplayer games, competition is usually the first thing that comes to mind—and for good reason. It simultaneously fills several kinds of needs and desires for us. All at once, it

  3. 合作:与竞争相反,这是我们喜欢一起玩的“另一种方式”。合作游戏对我们来说很有趣,因为它们

    • 让我们参与游戏活动并采用单人无法实现的游戏策略(例如,一对一的棒球几乎没有意义)

    • 让我们享受集体解决问题和成为成功团队一员所带来的(可能是进化而来的)深刻乐趣

    虽然有些人认为合作游戏是实验性的,但那只是当玩家与自动对手合作时的情况。大多数合作游戏都遵循团队运动的模式,既能享受合作的乐趣,又能享受竞争的乐趣。

  4. Collaboration: The opposite of competition, this is the “other way” we like to play together. Collaborative games are enjoyable to us because they

    • Allow us to partake in game actions and employ game strategies that are impossible with just one person (e.g., one-on-one baseball makes almost no sense)

    • Let us enjoy the (presumably evolved) deep pleasures that come from group problem solving and being part of a successful team

    And while some people think of collaborative games as experimental, that is only the case when players are collaborating against an automated opponent. Most collaborative games follow the mold of team sports, which allow all the pleasures of collaboration and the pleasures of competition at the same time.

  5. 聚会:我们喜欢和朋友聚在一起,但只是露面并被迫定期交谈可能会在社交上很尴尬。游戏就像食物一样,为我们提供了一个聚在一起的便利理由,让我们有东西可以分享,让我们专注于某件事,而不会让房间里的任何人感到不舒服。游戏是孩子和父母共度时光的好方法,许多人的友谊都是通过每周的国际象棋、高尔夫、网球、桥牌、宾果游戏、篮球比赛,或者最近的《英雄联盟》《使命召唤》《与朋友一起玩文字游戏》来建立起来的

  6. Meeting up: We like to get together with our friends, but it can be socially awkward to just show up and be forced to make conversation on a regular basis. Games, like food, give us a convenient reason to be together, give us something to share, and give us something to focus on that won’t make anyone in the room uncomfortable. Games are a great way for kids and parents to spend time with each other, and many are the friendships held together by a weekly game of chess, golf, tennis, bridge, bingo, basketball, or, more recently, League of Legends, Call of Duty, or Words with Friends.

  7. 探索我们的朋友:虽然有借口和朋友见面很棒,但游戏让我们可以做其他一些我们无法通过交谈轻易做到的事情——探索朋友的思想和灵魂。在谈话中,我们会听到朋友关于喜欢和不喜欢的意见,以及他们关于他们和其他人行为方式的故事。但这些事情都经过了朋友的过滤,他们认为我们想听到什么。然而,当我们和他们一起玩游戏时,我们会看到一些更像不加掩饰的真相。我们可以看到他们解决问题。我们可以看到他们在压力下做出艰难的决定。我们可以看到他们决定何时给别人机会,何时在背后捅刀子。我们了解了谁可以信任,谁不能信任。正如柏拉图所说,“一小时的游戏比一年的谈话更能了解一个人。”

  8. Exploring our friends: And while it is great to have an excuse to meet up with our friends, games let us do something else that we can’t do so easily with just conversation—explore the minds and souls of our friends. In a conversation, we hear a friend’s opinions about likes and dislikes and their stories about the way they and other people have behaved. But these things are all filtered through the friend’s conception of what they think we want to hear. When we play a game with them, however, we get a glimpse of something more like the unvarnished truth. We get to see them solving problems. We get to see them making tough decisions under stress. We get to see them make decisions about when to cut someone a break and when to stab them in the back. We learn who we can trust and who we can’t. As Plato purportedly said, “You can learn more about a man in an hour of play than a year of conversation.”

  9. 探索自我:独自一人时,游戏让我们测试自己的能力极限,发现我们喜欢什么,了解我们想要改进什么。但是当我们与他人一起时,我们可以探索在压力下,在复杂的社交场合中我们将如何表现。当我们的朋友心情不好时,我们倾向于让他们赢,还是无条件地打败他们?我们更喜欢和谁组队,为什么?当众失败时,我们的感受如何,我们如何应对?我们的策略与他人有何不同,为什么?我们选择模仿谁,或者发现自己在模仿谁?所有这些问题,以及许多其他问题,都是在我们与其他人玩游戏时探索的。这些都不是琐碎的事情——它们是重要的事情,与我们如何看待自己以及如何与他人相处息息相关。

  10. Exploring ourselves: Alone, games let us test the limits of our abilities, finding out what we enjoy and learning what we want to improve at. But when we are with others, we get to explore how we will behave in complex social situations, under stress. Do we have a tendency to let our friends win when they have a bad day, or to crush them unconditionally? Who do we prefer to team with, and why? How do we feel when publicly defeated, and how do we cope with that? How do our strategies differ from others, and why? Who do we choose to imitate, or find ourselves imitating? All these questions, and many others, are explored when we play games with other people. These are not trivial things—they are important things, close to the heart of how we see ourselves and how we relate to other people.

值得注意的是,有些游戏甚至不需要每个人都玩。观看别人玩游戏就能建立良好的社交联系。因此,考虑如何为观众设计游戏变得非常重要。在像客厅这样的场所,这一点尤其重要,因为周围可能还有其他人更愿意看电视。如果你能让你的游戏成为一场引人入胜的盛宴,让他们更愿意观看——大笑、闲聊,并帮助玩家解决难题——你就做了一件非常有价值的事情。此外,越来越多的人通过流媒体视频远程观看游戏。观看是一种很容易被遗忘的视角,所以让我们一定要把它添加到我们的收藏中。

And it is worth noting that for some of these it isn’t even necessary for everyone to play. There can be a good social connection just watching someone else play a game. For that reason, it becomes very important to think about how you design for spectators. In a venue like the hearth (living room), this is particularly important, because there are likely to be others around who would rather be watching television. If you can make your game such a compelling spectacle that they’d rather watch it—laughing, kibbutzing, and helping the players solve hard problems—you’ve done something really worthwhile. Further, more and more people are watching gameplay remotely through streamed videos. Spectation is an easy perspective to forget, so let’s be sure to add it to our collection.

多人游戏中出现了一种新的风险,而当有人单独玩游戏时,这种风险就不那么重要了:作弊。单独作弊的玩家只是在作弊。但在其他玩家之间或针对其他玩家作弊则严重违反了社会契约。如果作弊者被抓住,其他人会羞辱他们。这会以两种不同的方式损害您的游戏。首先,如果您的游戏存在鼓励玩家作弊的漏洞,这会给玩家带来压力,他们需要时刻警惕作弊行为。但可作弊的游戏也面临更严重的问题:如果玩家意识到作弊是可能的,而他们又无法判断其他玩家是否在作弊,那么非作弊者就会想停止游戏,因为他们担心如果不作弊就无法获胜,谁愿意输给作弊者呢?这是所有类型的多人游戏和社交游戏中的一个重要观点。利用这个视角可以帮助您让您的游戏无法作弊。

A new risk appears with multiplayer games that is less important when someone plays alone: cheating. Players who cheat in isolation are only cheating themselves. But cheating amongst or against other players is meaningful breach of social contract. If the cheater is caught, others will shame them. This can harm your game in two different ways. First, if your game has loopholes in it that encourage players to cheat, it creates stress for the players, who need to keep an eye out for cheating behavior. But cheatable games suffer a much worse problem as well: if players realize that cheating is possible, and they can’t tell if other players are cheating or not, it makes the non-cheaters want to stop playing because they worry that they can’t win if they don’t cheat, and who wants to lose to a cheater? This is an important perspective in all kinds of multiplayer and social games. Take this lens to help you make your game uncheatable.

尽管多人游戏很重要,但您必须谨慎明智地使用它,因为它可能需要大量工作并且难以控制。通常,可以肯定地说,与类似的单人游戏相比,多人在线游戏需要四倍的努力和费用来制作。这是因为多人游戏的调试和平衡要困难得多。不过,如果拥有多人游戏的理由明确而确定,那么回报可能是值得的。如果添加它的原因是“因为多人游戏很酷”,那么你可能应该再仔细考虑一下。

Although multiplayer gameplay is important, you must employ it carefully and wisely, because it can be a lot of work and hard to control. Generally, it is safe to assume that a multiplayer online game will take four times the effort and expense to create compared to a similar single-player game. This is because multiplayer games are much more difficult to debug and to balance. The payoffs can be worth it, though—if the reasons for having the multiplayer gameplay are clear and certain. If the reason to add it is “because multiplay is cool,” you should probably think it through a little more.

我们喜欢和其他人一起玩游戏的原因有很多,但都很有力。还有一个比这里列出的更有力的原因,是我们下一章的主题。

There are many different, powerful reasons that we like to play games with other people. One additional reason, more powerful than the ones listed here, is the topic of our next chapter.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

第二十 五章

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

其他玩家有时会组建社区

Other Players Sometimes Form Communities



25.1

FIGURE

25.1

不仅仅是其他玩家

More than Just Other Players

游戏能够激发玩家的真正热情,因此游戏周围经常会出现社区也就不足为奇了。这些社区可能是粉丝社区(如职业体育),也可能是玩家社区(如《魔兽世界》《堡垒之夜》 ),也可能是设计师社区(如《我的世界》《小小大星球》)。这些社区可以成为非常强大的力量,通过不断吸引新玩家,将游戏的寿命延长很多年。

Games are something that inspires real passion in players, so it is not surprising that frequently, communities arise around games. These can be communities of fans, as in professional sports, or communities of players, as in World of Warcraft and Fortnite, or communities of designers, as in Minecraft and Little Big Planet. These communities can be very powerful forces, extending the life of a game by many years by constantly drawing in new players.

但社区究竟是什么?答案并不那么简单。它不仅仅是一群彼此认识或做同样事情的人。你可能每天都和同样的人一起坐火车,但从来没有感受到社区感。但你可能会和完全陌生的人一起感受到一种社区感,他们都是你喜欢的同一部深奥电视剧的粉丝。成为社区的一员会有一种特殊的感觉。这种感觉很难描述,但我们一感觉到它,就知道了。两位心理学家试图更好地理解这种社区感,他们发现它有四个主要元素:

But what is a community, really? The answer is not so simple. It is not merely a group of people who know each other or who do the same thing. You might ride the train with the same people every day but never feel a sense of community in doing so. But you might feel a sense of community with total strangers who are fans of the same esoteric TV series that you love. There is a special feeling that goes with being part of a community. It is hard to describe, but we know it when we feel it. Two psychologists who set out to better understand this sense of community found that it has four primary elements:

  1. 会员资格:一些独特的东西清楚地表明您是这个团体的一部分。

  2. Membership: Something distinct makes it clear you are part of this group.

  3. 影响力:成为这个团体的一部分会让你对某些事物拥有权力。

  4. Influence: Being part of this group gives you power over something.

  5. 需求的整合和满足:成为这个团体的一部分会为您带来一些好处。

  6. Integration and fulfillment of needs: Being part of this group does something for you.

  7. 共享的情感联系:您可以保证与小组中的其他人分享对某些事件的情感。

  8. Shared emotional connection: You have some guarantee of sharing emotions about certain events with others in the group.

虽然这四个方面无疑是社区的重要方面,但我发现有时我更喜欢设计师 Amy Jo Kim 对社区的简洁定义:一群具有共同兴趣、目的或目标的人,他们随着时间的推移彼此更加了解。

And while these four are unquestionably important aspects of community, I find I sometimes prefer designer Amy Jo Kim’s succinct definition of community: a group of people with a shared interest, purpose, or goal who get to know each other better over time.

但是,作为一名游戏设计师,你为什么希望围绕你的游戏形成社区呢?主要有三个原因:

But why, as a game designer, do you want communities to form around your game? There are three main reasons:

  1. 成为社区的一部分满足了社会需求:人们需要感受到自己是某种事物的一部分,正如镜头#22需求向我们展示的那样,社会需求非常强大。

  2. Being part of a community fills a social need: People need to feel a part of something, and as Lens #22: Needs, shows us, social needs are very powerful.

  3. 更长的“传染期”:朋友的个人推荐是购买游戏时最有影响力的因素。游戏设计师威尔·赖特曾经指出,如果我们真的相信对游戏的兴趣会像病毒一样传播,那么研究流行病学就很有意义。我们从流行病学中了解到的一件事是,当传染期加倍时,感染疾病的人数可能会增加十倍。在我们的情况下,“感染疾病”意味着购买游戏。但游戏的“传染期”是什么意思呢?这是玩家对游戏如此兴奋以至于他们不断与认识的每个人谈论游戏的时期。成为游戏一部分的玩家游戏社区的病毒式传播很可能会在很长一段时间内保持“传染性”,因为游戏将成为他们生活中更深层次的一部分,让他们有很多话题可谈。威尔一如既往地走在了时代的前沿,因为病毒式传播现在被视为社交和手机游戏成功的关键因素。

  4. Longer “period of contagion”: The personal recommendation of a friend is the most influential factor when purchasing a game. Game designer Will Wright once pointed out that if we truly believe that interest in a game spreads like a virus, it makes sense to study epidemiology. And one thing that we know from epidemiology is that when the period of contagion doubles, the number of people who catch the disease can increase by ten times. “Catching the disease” in our case means buying the game. But what does “period of contagion” for a game mean? It is the time when a player is so excited about a game that they are talking about it constantly with everyone they know. Players who become part of a game community are likely to “stay contagious” for a long time, as the game will become a deeper part of their lives, giving them a lot to talk about. Will was, as usual, ahead of the curve, as virality is now seen as a key component for success in social and mobile games.

  5. 更多游戏时间:玩家开始玩游戏是为了游戏的乐趣,但长期玩游戏是为了社区的乐趣。有一次,我和一个朋友和他的大家庭一起去山区度假,在去的路上,他告诉我他家喜欢玩一种纸牌游戏。那天晚上,吃完晚饭后,整个家族都围坐在一张大桌子旁玩游戏,我很想知道他们为什么这么喜欢这个不熟悉的游戏。他们解释了规则,规则非常简单——基本上就是把牌从右边传到右边,直到所有的牌都按顺序排列好。不需要做太多决定,也几乎不需要任何技巧。有时,甚至很难说谁赢了。我非常失望,但当我环顾桌子四周时,只有我一个人在玩。其他人都在边玩边聊天、开玩笑、大笑——突然我意识到游戏不完美并不重要——重要的是它让他们坐在桌边,享受彼此的陪伴,让他们手忙脚乱但头脑自由。一款能够培养社区的游戏将会被玩很长时间,无论它的其他品质有多么欠缺。如果你的游戏的经济成功依赖于订阅续订、续集销售或微交易,那么社区让人们想玩更长时间就变得非常重要。

  6. More hours of play: It is often the case that players start to play a game for the game’s pleasures but stay with it over a long period for the community’s pleasures. I took a mountain vacation with a friend and his extended family once, and on the way there, he told me about a card game that his family loved playing. That evening, after dinner, the whole clan gathered around a big table to play, and I was quite eager to learn what it was about this unfamiliar game that they liked so well. They explained the rules, which were mind bogglingly simple—they basically consisted of passing cards to the right until all the cards were sorted in order. There were few decisions to make, and almost no skill whatever was required. Sometimes, it was hard even to say who won. I was incredibly disappointed, but as I looked around the table, I was the only one. Everyone else was talking, joking, and laughing as they played—and suddenly I realized that it didn’t matter that the game wasn’t perfect—what mattered was that it held them at the table and let them enjoy each other’s company, keeping their hands busy but their minds free. A game that has the ability to engender community will get played for a long, long time, no matter how lacking its other qualities might be. If the financial success of your game relies on subscription renewals, selling sequels, or microtransactions, the fact that community makes people want to play it longer becomes very important.

打造强大社区的十个秘诀

Ten Tips for Strong Communities

社区很复杂,涉及许多不同的相互关联的心理现象,但您可以做一些基本的事情来帮助围绕您的游戏建立一个社区。

Community is complex and involves many different interrelated psychological phenomena, but there are some basic things you can do to help foster a community around your game.

社区建议 #1:培养友谊

Community Tip #1: Foster Friendships

网络友谊的概念似乎很简单。就像真正的友谊一样,只不过是在网上,对吧?但我们对友谊的本质到底了解多少?我们如何才能将其转化为游戏环境?要与他人建立有意义的网络关系,需要三件事:

The idea of online friendships seems simple. Just like real friendships, but online, right? But what do we really understand about the nature of friendship? And how can we translate it to a game environment? To have a meaningful online relationship with another person requires three things:

  1. 交谈能力:这听起来很明显。但令人惊讶的是,许多在线游戏都没有为玩家提供相互交谈的能力——设计者希望通过游戏进行某种非语言交流,这就足够了。但这还不够。要形成一个社区,玩家必须能够自由地相互交谈。

  2. The ability to talk: This sounds obvious. But a surprising number of online games have been created that offer players no ability to talk to each other—the designers hoping that some kind of nonverbal communication would happen through play and that would be enough. It is not enough. For a community to form, players must be able to speak to each other freely.

  3. 值得交谈的人:您不能假设所有玩家都想互相交谈,就像您不能假设公交车上的陌生人会交往一样。社交媒体的爆炸式增长向我们表明,大多数人主要对与 (1) 他们的朋友和 (2) 名人建立联系感兴趣。您必须清楚地了解您的玩家想与谁交谈以及原因。这在很大程度上取决于您的人口统计数据。成年人通常想与能够理解他们问题的人交谈。青少年经常寻找不同性别的成员或比他们普通朋友更有趣的其他人。而孩子们通常对陌生人不感兴趣 - 他们更喜欢与现实生活中的朋友交往。但仅仅了解这些基于年龄的概括是不够的 - 您必须了解特定于您的游戏的社交类型。您的玩家是在寻找竞争对手吗?合作者?助手?快速聊天还是长期关系?如果玩家找不到他们有兴趣交谈的人,他们很快就会离开。

  4. Someone worth talking to: You cannot assume that all your players will want to talk to each other, any more than you can assume that strangers on a bus will mingle. The explosion of social media has shown us that most people are mainly interested in connecting with (1) their friends and (2) celebrities. You must have a clear understanding of who your players want to talk to and why. This varies a great deal depending on your demographics. Adults often want to talk to others who can relate to their problems. Teenagers often seek members of another gender or other people more interesting than their regular friends. And children generally have little interest in strangers—they would prefer to socialize with friends from real life. But understanding these age-based generalizations is not enough—you must understand the types of socialization that are specific to your game. Do your players seek competitors? Collaborators? Assistants? Quick chats or long-term relationships? If players can’t find the people they are interested in talking to, they will quickly drift away.

  5. 值得讨论的内容:前两项可以通过一个好的聊天室来满足。培养社区的游戏为玩家提供了源源不断的话题。这些话题可以来自游戏本身(Words with FriendsDraw Something等游戏每次玩时都有不同的内容)、游戏固有的策略深度(例如,策略讨论是国际象棋社区的主要话题)或来自事件,或随着时间的推移而引入的规则变化(大型多人在线游戏 [MMO] 和收藏卡牌游戏 [CCG] 中的典型话题)。经常听到人们说“好的在线游戏比游戏更注重社区”,但事实并非如此。好的在线游戏必须在社区和游戏之间取得良好的平衡。如果游戏不够有趣,社区就没有什么可谈的。另一方面,如果社区对你的游戏的支持不够好,玩家会喜欢游戏,但最终会离开。

  6. Something worth talking about: The first two items could be satisfied by a good chat room. Games that foster community give the players a steady stream of things to talk about. This can come from the gameplay itself (games like Words with Friends and Draw Something have different content every time you play), depth of strategy inherent in the game (e.g., strategy discussion is a prime topic for chess communities) or from events, or rule changes that are introduced over time (typical topics of conversation in Massively Multiplayer Online games [MMOs] and Collectible Card Games [CCGs]). It is common to hear people say that “good online games are more community than game,” but this isn’t really true. Good online games must have a solid balance of community and game. If the game isn’t interesting enough, the community doesn’t have anything to talk about. On the other hand, if the community support for your game isn’t good enough, players will enjoy the game, but eventually wander off.

很多游戏都是专为与好友一起玩而设计的。但是如何在游戏中结交新朋友呢?友谊有三个不同的阶段,如果你想让友谊蓬勃发展并持续下去,你的游戏还必须对每个阶段提供良好的支持:

Plenty of games are designed to just be played with your friends. But what about making new friends in your game? Friendships have three distinct phases, and your game must also have good support for each of them if you want friendships to blossom and survive:

  • 友谊阶段 1:打破僵局。在两个人成为朋友之前,他们必须先见面。初次见面总是很尴尬。理想情况下,你的游戏应该有一种方法,让人们可以轻松找到他们可能想成为朋友的人,然后以某种方式与他们互动,这种方式社交压力较小,但允许他们表达自己,这样其他人就可以看到他们是什么样的人。

  • Friendship phase 1: Breaking the ice. Before two people can become friends, they first must meet. Meeting people for the first time is awkward. Ideally, your game will have a way that people can easily find the kind of people they might like to be friends with and then have some way to engage with them that is low in social pressure but allows them to express themselves a little, so others can see what they are like.

  • 友谊阶段 2:成为朋友。两个人“成为朋友”的那一刻是神秘而微妙的——但它几乎总是涉及到关于双方都关心的事情的对话。而在游戏中,这种对话是通常是关于两个朋友刚刚分享的游戏体验。让玩家在紧张的游戏体验后有机会互相聊天是鼓励建立友谊的最佳方式之一。在游戏中创建交友仪式可能是个好主意,例如邀请另一位玩家加入你的“好友列表”。

  • Friendship phase 2: Becoming friends. The moment when two people “become friends” is mysterious and subtle—but it almost always involves conversation about something both of them care about. And in games, that conversation is often about a gameplay experience the two friends just shared. Giving players opportunities to chat with each other after an intense play experience is one of the best ways to encourage the formation of friendships. It can be a good idea to create a friend-making ritual in your game, such as inviting another player to be on your “friends list.”

  • 友谊阶段 3:维持友谊。结识新朋友是一回事,维持友谊又是另一回事。要维持朋友关系,您必须能够再次找到他们,以继续你们的友谊。在现实世界中,这主要取决于朋友,但在网络游戏中,您需要为人们提供某种方式,让他们能够再次找到彼此。这可能是通过好友列表、公会,甚至通过令人难忘的昵称。只要有效就行!但您必须做点什么,否则您的游戏就会失去友谊的力量,而友谊正是将社区凝聚在一起的粘合剂。

  • Friendship phase 3: Staying friends. Meeting people and making friends is one thing—staying friends is another. To stay friends with someone, you must be able to find them again to continue your friendship. In the real world, this is mostly up to the friends, but in online games, you need to give people some way they can find each other again. This might be through friends lists, or guilds, or even through memorable nicknames. Whatever works! But you have to do something, or your game misses out on the power of friendship, which is the glue that holds communities together.

请记住,不同的人对不同类型的友谊感兴趣。成年人通常最感兴趣的是结交志趣相投的朋友,而孩子则更感兴趣的是与现实生活中的朋友一起玩游戏。友谊对社区和游戏来说都至关重要,因此它值得用自己的视角来看待。

Do keep in mind that different people are interested in different kinds of friendships. Adults are often most interested in making friends with similar interests, while kids are more interested in playing games with their real-life friends. Friendship is so crucial to community, and to gameplaying in general, that it deserves its own lens.

社区建议 #2:将冲突置于核心位置

Community Tip #2: Put Conflict at the Heart

在线游戏先驱乔纳森·巴伦 (Jonathan Baron) 指出,冲突是所有社区的核心。运动队之所以成为一个强大的社区,是因为他们与其他球队存在冲突。家长/教师协会在为更好的学校而奋斗时成为一个社区。一群古董车迷在与熵的共同斗争中成为一个社区。对我们来说幸运的是,冲突是游戏的自然组成部分。但并非所有游戏冲突都会形成社区。例如,单人纸牌游戏中的冲突对建立社区没有多大帮助。游戏中的冲突必须要么促使玩家证明自己比其他所有人都优秀(与其他玩家的冲突),要么是那种当人们共同努力时更有可能得到解决的冲突(与游戏的冲突)。许多游戏都是在这两种冲突的基础上建立社区的:例如,集换式卡牌游戏都是关于成为社区中最优秀的玩家,但它们的策略非常复杂,玩家需要花费大量时间分享和讨论策略。同样,我的世界 (Minecraft)是关于共同努力建造东西,也是关于成为社区中最优秀的玩家。

Online game pioneer Jonathan Baron makes the point that conflict is at the heart of all communities. A sports team becomes a strong community because they have conflict with other teams. A parent/teacher association becomes a community when they are fighting for better schools. A group of vintage car fanatics become a community in their shared battle against entropy. Fortunately for us, conflict is a natural part of games. But not all game conflict results in community. The conflict in solitaire, for example, doesn’t do much to create a community. The conflict in your game must either spur players to demonstrate that they are better than everyone else (conflict against other players) or be the kind of conflict that is more likely to be resolved when people work together (conflict against the game). Many games build community on both of these kinds of conflict: collectible card games, for example, are all about being the very best player in your community, but their strategies are so complex that players spend a lot of time sharing and discussing strategies. Similarly, Minecraft is about working together to build things but also about being the best player in the community.

社区建议 #3:利用建筑塑造你的社区

Community Tip #3: Use Architecture to Shape Your Community

在一些社区里,人们并不真正了解他们的邻居。而在另一些社区里,每个人都认识其他人,整个社区都有一种社区意识。这是因为人们不同吗?不是的。这通常是社区设计方式的副作用。设计为可步行(并有有意义的目的地可步行)的社区为邻居提供了交流的机会。而有很多死胡同的社区往往没有太多的过境交通,所以当你看到有人路过时,你很有可能认识他们。换句话说,你经常有机会一遍又一遍地看到和与同一个人交谈。在线世界可以支持这些相同的设计功能,部分是通过好友列表和公会,但部分是通过创建人们可能一次又一次见面并且还有时间交谈的地方。许多 MMO 都有人们倾向于随意聚集和聊天的区域——这些区域通常是许多玩家在前往一些重要的游戏业务的途中经常经过的地方。

In some neighborhoods, people don’t really know their neighbors. In others, everyone knows everyone else, and the whole neighborhood has a sense of community. Is this because the people are different? No. It is usually a side effect of how the neighborhoods are designed. Neighborhoods that are designed to be walkable (and with meaningful destinations to walk to) give neighbors a chance to communicate. And neighborhoods with a lot of dead-end streets tend not to have a lot of through traffic, so that when you see someone passing by, there is a good chance you will know them. In other words, there are frequent opportunities to see and talk with the same people over and over again. Online worlds can support these same design features, partly through buddy lists and guilds, but partly by creating places where people are likely to see each other again and again and still have time to talk. Many MMOs have areas where people tend to casually congregate and chat—these areas are often at a place where many players pass by regularly on their way to some important game business.

社区提示#4:创建社区财产

Community Tip #4: Create Community Property

当你可以在游戏中创造不只属于单个玩家,而是属于多个玩家的东西时,这确实可以鼓励玩家团结起来。例如,也许没有单个玩家买得起游戏中的船,但一群人可以组队并共同拥有它。这个群体实际上会立即成为一个社区,因为他们必须经常交流并相互友好相处。《星战前夜》的巨大成功很大程度上是基于社区财产。你创造的财产不需要太有形——例如,行会的地位就是一种社区财产。

When you can create things in your game that are not just owned by an individual player but by several, it can really encourage players to band together. Perhaps, for example, no individual player can afford to buy a ship in your game, but a group could team up and own it together. This group practically becomes an instant community, since they have to communicate frequently and be friendly to each other. The tremendous success of Eve Online is largely based on community property. The property you create doesn’t need to be so tangible—a guild’s status, for example, is a type of community property.

社区建议 #5:让玩家表达自我

Community Tip #5: Let Players Express Themselves

在任何多人游戏中,自我表达都非常重要。虽然玩家确实可以通过游戏策略和游戏风格来表达自己,但为什么要止步于此呢?毕竟,您正在创造一个幻想世界,玩家可以随心所欲地做自己:为什么不让他们表达呢?丰富、富有表现力的角色创建系统深受网络游戏玩家的喜爱。对话系统也是如此,它允许玩家表达情感或选择要显示的文本的颜色和样式。从《英雄联盟》Color Switch》,购买网络游戏中的“装饰物品”都是游戏盈利的关键部分。

Self-expression is very important in any multiplayer game. And while it is certainly true that players can express themselves through their gameplay strategies and styles of play, why stop there? You are, after all, creating a fantasy world where players can be whatever they would like to: why not let them express that? Rich, expressive avatar creation systems are much beloved by players of online games. So are systems of conversation that allow players to convey emotion or choose colors and styles for their text to display. The purchase of “vanity items” in online games is a key part of monetization for games ranging from League of Legends to Color Switch.

玩家的表达能力并不局限于网络游戏——想想猜字谜游戏或画图猜词游戏的表现力吧。游戏设计师肖恩·帕顿曾经设计过一款棋盘游戏,游戏的主角是想在不弄脏自己的情况下获得乐趣的孩子。每当你弄脏了,你就必须把脏东西涂到你的角色卡上。玩家们编造了关于他们如何弄脏自己,并根据故事情节给角色涂上颜色的故事,从中获得了很多乐趣。即使是大富翁也允许玩家表达自己——尽管它只适合 2-8 名玩家,但游戏有 12 种不同的棋子,因为这是一种确保玩家有机会表达自己的简单方法。

Player expression is not limited to online games—consider the expressive power in charades or Pictionary. Game designer Shawn Patton once created a board game all about being a kid trying to have fun without getting dirty. Whenever you got dirty, you had to color your dirt onto your character card. Players had great fun making up stories about how they got dirty and coloring their characters to match the story. Even Monopoly allows the players expression—although it is for only 2–8 players, the game has 12 different playing pieces, because it is an easy way to make sure players get a chance to express themselves.

自我表达非常重要,但很容易被忽视。记住这一点,这样你就会记得让玩家表达自己。

Self-expression is extremely important but easily overlooked. Keep this lens so you remember to let players express themselves.

社区建议 #6:支持三个层级

Community Tip #6: Support Three Levels

重要的是要意识到,在设计游戏社区时,你实际上是在为不同经验水平的玩家设计三款不同的游戏。有些人可能会说还有更多,但至少有以下三款:

It is important to realize that when designing a game community, you are really designing three separate games for players at different levels of experience. Some might argue there are even more, but there are at the minimum these three:

  1. 第 1 级:新手。刚加入游戏社区的玩家经常会不知所措。游戏本身还没有给他们带来挑战——他们只是通过学习玩游戏才感到挑战。从某种意义上说,学习玩游戏就是他们的游戏——所以你有义务设计这个学习过程,使其尽可能有回报。如果你不这样做,新手会在真正进入游戏之前就放弃游戏,而你的受众也会大大减少。让新手感到有回报并与游戏产生联系的最佳方法之一是创造让他们与更有经验的玩家进行有意义的互动的情况。一些有经验的玩家喜欢问候和教导新手,以自娱自乐,但如果没有足够多的玩家倾向于这样做,那么为什么不在游戏中给予帮助新手的奖励呢?Battletech的在线版本以一种有趣的方式间接实现了这一点——有经验的玩家扮演将军的角色,必须招募自己的军队。新手们很荣幸被邀请,更荣幸的是被安排在战斗现场——前线,一个经验丰富的玩家学会避开的地方。尽管新手通常会被屠杀,但在某种程度上这是双赢的——将军们得到了很多“炮灰”,新玩家则立即体验了战斗的滋味。

  2. Level 1: The newbie. Players who are new to game communities are often overwhelmed. They aren’t yet challenged by the game itself—they are challenged just by learning to play the game. In a sense, learning to play the game is the game for them—and so you are obligated to design that learning process so that it is as rewarding as possible. If you don’t, newbies will give up on the game before they really get into it, and you will significantly limit your audience. One of the best ways to make newbies feel rewarded and connected to the game is to create situations where they get to interact meaningfully with more experienced players. Some experienced players like greeting and teaching newbies for their own enjoyment, but if not enough of your players tend to do this, then why not give in-game rewards for helping newbies? An online version of Battletech did this indirectly in an interesting way—experienced players took the role of generals and had to recruit their own armies. Newbies were honored to be asked and further honored to be placed right where the action is—on the front line, a place more experienced players learned to avoid. Even though the newbies would generally get slaughtered, it was win-win, in a way—the generals got lots of “cannon fodder,” and the new players got a taste of the action right away.

  3. 第 2 级:玩家。玩家已经过了新手阶段。他们完全理解游戏,沉浸在游戏活动中,并想方设法掌握游戏。游戏中的大部分设计都是针对这一群体的。

  4. Level 2: The player. The player is past the newbie stage. They completely understand the game and are immersed in the game activities and in figuring out how to master them. Most of the design that goes into the game is aimed at this group.

  5. 第 3 级:老玩家。对于许多游戏,尤其是涉及某种“升级”系统的在线游戏,游戏本身都会变得不再有趣。大多数秘密已被发现,许多游戏乐趣已被榨干。当玩家达到这种状态时,他们往往会离开,寻找具有新秘密的新游戏。然而,有些游戏通过为这些老玩家提供完全不同的游戏来留住他们——适合他们的技能、专业知识和对游戏的热爱程度的游戏。留住老玩家会带来巨大的好处,因为他们通常是游戏最直言不讳的宣传者,而且他们是游戏专家,通常能够教你如何改进游戏。一些典型的“老玩家游戏”包括:

    • 更难的游戏:中局通常涉及逐步、清晰地向目标前进,尤其是在 MMO 游戏中:当目标达成时,接下来会怎样?有时,高级玩家会遇到不同类型的游戏,难度要大得多——事实上,难度大到没有人能够始终如一地掌握它。在Toontown Online中,“Cog Headquarters”具有全新平台游戏玩法和全新战斗系统的区域就是为了实现这一目的。有些游戏让你从士兵晋升为将军。其他游戏则从让你与电脑对战转变为让你与其他玩家对战。有很多方法可以增加游戏难度——但你总是会问:当长辈厌倦了游戏时该怎么办?

    • 治理特权:有些游戏赋予老玩家特殊级别的责任,例如决定游戏规则。许多多人地下城 (MUD) 赋予老玩家此类权力。这是一种让老玩家参与进来并让他们感到特别的好方法,尽管如果你给他们太多控制权,你会面临一些风险。收藏卡社区通常有正式的系统,经验丰富的玩家可以通过测试成为游戏锦标赛的官方评委。

    • 创造的乐趣:真正热爱游戏的玩家经常幻想以新的方式扩展游戏,特别是当他们厌倦了游戏时。那么,为什么不让他们这样做呢?《模拟人生》《天际》等游戏通过让玩家创造和分享自己的内容建立了强大的社区。许多老年人到了这样的地步,他们只是偶尔玩游戏,但大部分时间都在创造新内容。对他们来说,新游戏成为一种地位:他们能成为最受欢迎和最受尊敬的设计师吗?

    • 公会管理:当玩家组建团体时,这些团体通常会受益于组织者。长老通常会自己做这件事,但如果你给他们一套强大的工具来帮助管理他们的公会,这项活动对他们来说会更有吸引力。

    • 教学机会:正如许多现实世界中的专家都喜欢教学机会一样,游戏专家也喜欢。如果你能给予他们许可和鼓励,他们中的一些人会很乐意担任新手的大使和普通玩家的向导。一些在线游戏,如Entropia Universe,为想要教学的老年人提供特殊地位,称他们为专家和教师,这是他们通常非常自豪的事情。

  6. Level 3: The elder. For many games, particularly for any online game involving some kind of “leveling” system, there comes a point where the game itself is no longer interesting. Most of the secrets have been discovered, and many of the game pleasures have been squeezed dry. When players reach this state, they tend to leave, seeking a new game with new secrets. Some games, however, manage to retain these elder players by giving them an entirely different game to play—one that befits their level of skill, expertise, and devotion to the game. There is tremendous benefit to keeping elders around, since they are often some of the most vocal advertisers of your game and, further, they are experts about your game, often able to teach you how to improve it. Some typical “elder games” include the following:

    • A more difficult game: Often, particularly in MMOs, the middle game is about gradual, clear progression toward a goal: when the goal is reached, then what? Sometimes a different kind of game is presented to the higher-level players, which is much more difficult—so difficult, in fact, that no one can ever consistently master it. In Toontown Online, “Cog Headquarters” areas that featured a new, platform-based gameplay and new battle system served this purpose. Some games let you rise in the ranks from soldier to general. Other games change from pitting you against the computer to pitting you against the other players. There are many ways to add a more difficult game—but you are always left with the question: what to do when elders get tired of it?

    • Governance privileges: Some games give the elder players special levels of responsibility, such as deciding the rules of the game. Many Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) gave elder players these kinds of powers. It is a great way to keep the elders involved and make them feel special, although you run some risk if you hand them too much control. Collectible card communities often have formal systems where experienced players can take tests to become official judges at game tournaments.

    • The joy of creation: Players who truly love a game often fantasize about extending it in new ways, particularly when they have grown tired of it. So, why not let them? Games like The Sims and Skyrim have built strong communities by letting players create and share their own content. Many elders get to the point where they play the games only occasionally but spend most of their time creating new content. For them, the new game becomes one of status: can they become the most popular and respected designer?

    • Guild management: When players form groups, these groups often benefit from having organizers. Elders will often do this on their own, but if you give them a strong set of tools to help run their guild, the activity will be all the more appealing to them.

    • A chance to teach: Just as many experts in real-world activities enjoy a chance to teach, so do game experts. If you can give them both permission and encouragement to do so, some of them will enjoy serving as ambassadors to the newbies and guides to the regular players. Some online games, such as Entropia Universe, give elders who would like to teach special status noting them as experts and teachers, which is something they are generally very proud of.

这三个层次听起来可能很繁琐,但实际上,它们通常可以很容易地实现。例如,每年复活节,我的社区都会为所有住在那里的孩子举办寻蛋活动。他们很自然地发现,有三个层次的游戏效果最好:

These three levels might sound like a lot of work, but really, they can often be implemented quite simply. Every year at Easter, for example, my neighborhood hosts an egg hunt for all the kids who live there. Quite naturally, they have found that it works best to have three levels of play:

  • 第 1 级——2-5 岁(新手):这些孩子在与大孩子分开的区域寻找彩蛋,因此不必担心与他们竞争。所有彩蛋都放在显眼的地方——根本没有隐藏。然而,对于这些学龄前儿童来说,仅仅是在这个空间中导航、发现彩蛋并捡起它们就已经很有挑战性了。这里有很多彩蛋,而且没有爱出风头的大孩子来破坏乐趣。

  • Level 1—ages 2–5 (newbies): These kids hunt for eggs in a separate area from the older kids, so there is no concern about having to compete with them. All the eggs are placed in plain sight—not really hidden at all. For these preschoolers, though, just navigating the space, spotting the eggs, and picking them up are plenty of challenge. There are plenty of eggs and no pushy big kids to spoil the fun.

  • 第 2 级——6-9 岁(玩家):这些孩子喜欢在广阔的区域进行标准的寻蛋游戏,蛋藏在有时很棘手的地方。虽然有足够多的蛋供每个人寻找,但孩子们仍然需要快速移动并仔细观察。

  • Level 2—ages 6–9 (players): These kids enjoy a standard egg hunt over a large area, with eggs hidden in places that are sometimes tricky. There are enough eggs for everyone, but kids still need to move fast and look carefully.

  • 第 3 级——10-13 岁(长者):这些年龄较大的孩子被赋予了藏鸡蛋的任务。与年龄较小的孩子相比,他们对这份工作感到非常自豪——他们觉得这份工作既有挑战性又有趣,对这份责任感到很荣幸,并且很享受这份工作赋予他们的地位。他们也经常喜欢给遇到困难的孩子提供提示。

  • Level 3—ages 10–13 (elders): These older children are given the task of hiding the eggs. They are very proud of this job—they find it challenging and fun, feel honored with the responsibility, and enjoy the status it gives them, compared to the younger kids. They also often enjoy giving hints to the kids who are having trouble.

社区建议 #7:迫使玩家相互依赖

Community Tip #7: Force Players to Depend on Each Other

冲突本身无法创造社区。冲突情况必须是其他玩家的帮助有助于解决冲突的情况。大多数电子游戏设计师已经习惯于设计单人游戏,即使是多人游戏。他们的逻辑是“我们不想排除喜欢独自玩游戏的玩家”。这种担忧是合理的。但是,当你创造一款单人游戏就能掌握的游戏时,你就贬低了社区的价值。另一方面,如果你创造了玩家必须沟通和互动才能取得成功的情况,你就赋予了社区真正的价值。这通常涉及从玩家那里夺走一些东西的反直觉步骤。手机游戏Spaceteam就是一个例子——每个玩家都拥有对任务至关重要的信息,只有其他人才能采取行动——这保证了持续的沟通。在Toontown Online中,我们的团队决定制定一条不寻常的规则:玩家在战斗中不能自愈——他们只能治疗其他玩家。我们非常担心一些玩家会觉得这条规则令人沮丧,但在我们实施这条规则后,情况似乎并非如此。相反,它很好地实现了目标。它迫使人们交流(“我需要一个 Toon-up!”)并鼓励他们互相帮助。还记得镜头 #80帮助吗?人们想要互相帮助——帮助别人是一种非常令人满意的感觉,即使只是帮助他们赢得电子游戏。但我们常常羞于帮助别人,因为担心我们提供帮助可能会冒犯他们。但如果你能创造一种让玩家需要彼此帮助并能轻松请求帮助的情况,其他人就会迅速伸出援手,你的社区也会因此变得更加强大。

Conflict alone cannot create community. The conflict situation must be one where getting aid from other players will help resolve the conflict. Most videogame designers have been conditioned to create games that are playable by a single player alone, even in a multiplayer game. The logic is something like “We don’t want to exclude players who would prefer to play alone.” And this is a valid concern. But when you create a game that can be mastered when playing solo, you diminish the value of community. If, on the other hand, you create situations where players must communicate and interact to succeed, you give community real value. This often involves the counterintuitive step of taking something away from the players. The mobile game Spaceteam exemplifies this—each player has information vital to the mission that only others can act on—which guarantees constant communication. In Toontown Online, our team decided on an unusual rule: players cannot heal themselves during a battle—they can only heal other players. There was a great deal of concern that some players would find the rule frustrating, but after we implemented it, this did not seem to be the case. Instead, it achieved its objectives well. It forced people to communicate (“I need a Toon-up!”) and encouraged them to help each other. Remember Lens #80: Help? People want to help each other—helping another person is a deeply satisfying feeling, even when it is just helping them win a videogame. But we are often shy about helping others, for fear we might insult them with our offer of help. But if you can create situations where players need each other’s help and can easily ask for it, others will quickly come to their aid, and your community will be the stronger for it.

社区建议 #8:管理你的社区

Community Tip #8: Manage Your Community

如果你相信社区对于你的游戏体验很重要,那么你需要做的不仅仅是祈祷它会发生。既然游戏可以根据玩家的反馈不断更新,玩家就会期待它。你需要创建适当的工具和系统来让你的玩家交流和组织,你可能需要有专业的社区经理来建立和维护设计师和玩家之间的强大反馈循环。把这些经理想象成园丁。他们不直接创建社区,但他们种植为他们播下种子,并通过观察和满足他们的特定需求来鼓励他们成长。这是一个培育、倾听和鼓励的角色。艾米·乔·金 (Amy Jo Kim) 的上述著作《网络社区建设》 (Community Building on the Web ) 提出了一些很好的建议,关于如何通过在“亲力亲为”和“放手不管”的方法之间取得适当的平衡来谨慎地管理在线社区。

If you believe that community is important to your game experience, you need to do more than just cross your fingers and hope it will happen. Now that games can be updated based on player feedback on an ongoing basis, players expect it. You need to create appropriate tools and systems to let your players communicate and organize, and you may need to have professional community managers who build and maintain a strong feedback loop between designers and players. Think of these managers like gardeners. They don’t create the communities directly, but they plant the seeds for them and encourage them to grow by observing and catering to their specific needs. This is a role of nurturing, listening, and encouraging. Amy Jo Kim’s aforementioned book, Community Building on the Web, has some excellent advice about how to carefully manage online communities by striking the right balance between a “hands-on” and “hands-off” approach.

社区建议 #9:对他人的义务是强大的

Community Tip #9: Obligation to Others Is Powerful

在澳大利亚部分原住民地区,出其不意地送礼被认为是不礼貌的,因为这样做会给回礼带来负担。这也许是文化上的极端做法,但对他人的义务是所有文化中都深刻感受到的。如果你能创造一种让玩家相互许诺(“我们星期三晚上 10 点见面,一起对抗一些巨魔”)或互相欠人情(“那个治疗咒语救了我的命!我欠你一个人情!”)的情境,玩家就会认真对待。许多《魔兽世界》玩家表示,对公会的义务是让他们定期玩游戏的最强大力量之一。这部分是因为他们想在公会中享有较高的地位,但通常还有另一个原因——避免低地位。送礼是 Facebook 游戏大规模传播的很大一部分原因。正如我们在镜头 #25判断中看到的,没有人希望被其他玩家负面评价,不履行承诺是让人们对你产生负面印象的最快方式之一。精心设计的玩家对玩家承诺系统是让玩家定期玩你的游戏并帮助建立强大社区的绝佳方式。

In parts of aboriginal Australia, it is considered rude to give a gift unexpectedly, because doing so creates a burden to give a return gift. This may be a cultural extreme, but obligation to others is something deeply felt in all cultures. If you can create situations where players can make promises to each other (“Let’s meet up at 10 p.m. Wednesday to fight some trolls”) or owe each other favors (“That healing spell saved my life! I owe you one!”), players will take them seriously. Many World of Warcraft players report that obligation to their guild is one of the strongest forces in getting them to play on a regular basis. This is partly because they want to enjoy high status in the guild, but often there is another reason—avoiding low status. Gifting was responsible for a huge part of the massively viral spread of Facebook games. As we’ve seen with Lens #25: Judgment, no one wants to be negatively judged by other players, and failing to live up to commitments is one of the quickest ways to make people think less of you. Carefully designed systems of player-to-player commitment are an excellent way to get players to play your game on a regular basis and to help build strong community.

社区建议 #10:创建社区活动

Community Tip #10: Create Community Events

几乎所有成功的社区都以定期活动为基础。在现实世界中,这些活动可以是会议、聚会、比赛、练习课程或颁奖典礼。在虚拟世界中,情况也大体相同。活动为社区提供多种用途:

Almost all successful communities are anchored by regular events. In the real world, these can be meetings, parties, competitions, practice sessions, or awards ceremonies. And in the virtual world, it’s pretty much the same. Events serve many purposes for a community:

  • 它们让玩家有所期待。

  • They give players something to look forward to.

  • 他们创造了一种共享的体验,让玩家感觉与社区更加紧密相连。

  • They create a shared experience, which makes players feel more connected to their community.

  • 它们标示时间,给玩家一些可以记住的东西。

  • They punctuate time, giving players something to remember.

  • 它们是与他人建立联系的机会的保证。

  • They are a guarantee of an opportunity to connect with others.

  • 了解到事件频繁发生会让玩家想要不断回来查看以了解即将发生哪些事件。

  • The knowledge that events are frequent makes players want to keep checking back to find out about which events are coming up.

玩家通常会创建自己的活动,但为什么不自己创建一些呢?对于在线游戏,这可以像为玩家创建一个简单的目标并发送群发电子邮件一样简单。

Players will often create their own events, but why not create some of your own? With an online game, it can be as simple as creating a simple goal for players and sending a mass email.

悲伤的挑战

The Challenge of Griefing

恶意破坏是任何基于社区的游戏(尤其是在线游戏)最终都必须面对的一个问题。对于一些玩家来说,游戏本身并不像戏弄、欺骗和折磨其他玩家那样有趣。如果你还记得 Bartle 的四人游戏类型,即红心、黑桃、方块和梅花(第 9 章玩家),那么恶意破坏者就是小丑。

Griefing is one issue that any community-based game, particularly an online game, has to deal with eventually. For some players, the game itself isn’t as enjoyable as teasing, tricking, and torturing the other players. If you remember Bartle’s four-player types matched to hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs (Chapter 9: Player), the griefer would be the Joker.

回想镜头#90地位,破坏者认为自己的地位高于其他玩家,因为他可以通过破坏其他玩家关心而他不关心的游戏来对他们施加影响。

Recalling Lens #90: Status, the griefer sees himself as higher status than the other players because of the power he can wield over them by spoiling a game that they care about and he doesn’t.

游戏设计师能对恶意破坏做些什么呢?有些游戏制定了“反恶意破坏政策”,禁止恶意破坏者进入游戏——这是处理问题的一种方法,但它造成了一种糟糕的局面,即必须对恶意破坏进行监管,然后必须维持一个“法庭”来决定哪些恶意破坏是故意滥用,哪些只是“胡闹”。更好的办法是避免使用让恶意破坏变得容易的游戏系统。以下是恶意破坏者最容易利用的系统:

What can a game designer do about griefing? Some games have created “antigriefing policies” that ban griefers from the game—this is one way to handle the problem, but it creates the ugly situation of having to police griefing and then having to maintain a “court of law” to decide which griefing was intentional abuse and which was just “fooling around.” A better idea is to avoid game systems that make griefing easy. These are the systems that are easiest for griefers to exploit:

  • 玩家对战:有些游戏,比如第一人称射击游戏,将玩家对战 (PvP) 战斗作为游戏的核心。但是如果你正在制作一款不以 PvP 战斗为核心活动的游戏,你应该仔细考虑为什么要支持它。虽然它可能很刺激,但它也可能让玩家感到不断受到威胁,永远没有安全感。这是无限制游戏中典型的恶意破坏者伎俩在 PvP 中,与玩家交朋友是明智之举,与他们相处一段时间,建立起信任,然后出其不意地杀死玩家并偷走他们的物品。你可以说这“只是游戏的一部分”,但一般来说,恶意破坏者这样做并不是为了在游戏中获得优势——他们这样做只是为了享受折磨他人的乐趣。最终,这会营造出一种玩家害怕与陌生人交谈的环境——而这会给你留下什么样的社区呢?如果你真的觉得 PvP 战斗是游戏的重要组成部分,你应该考虑将其限制在特殊区域或情况下,这样就很难将其用作恶意破坏的机会。

  • Player vs. player combat: Some games, such as first-person shooters, make player vs. player (PvP) combat the heart of the game. But if you are making a game where PvP combat is not the core activity, you should think carefully about why you are supporting it. While it can be exciting, it can also make players feel constantly threatened and never safe. A typical griefer trick in a game with no limits on PvP is to befriend a player, spending just enough time with them to build up some trust and then unexpectedly kill the player and steal their inventory. You could argue that this is “just part of the game,” but generally the griefers aren’t doing it for advantage in the game—they are doing it just for the enjoyment of torturing another human being. Ultimately, this creates an environment where players are afraid to talk to strangers—and what kind of community does that leave you with? If you really feel that PvP combat is an important part of your game, you should consider ways to confine it to special areas or circumstances, which makes it difficult to use it as a griefing opportunity.

  • 偷窃:在许多游戏中,物品赋予玩家巨大的力量。任何夺取他人这种力量的机会对恶意破坏者来说都非常有吸引力。这可以通过扒窃或在与玩家战斗后“抢劫”玩家来实现。被偷东西确实会让玩家感到被侵犯,因此恶意破坏者喜欢这样做。除非您打算制作一款让恶意破坏者感到有趣而让其他人感到沮丧的游戏,否则您可能不想支持允许玩家相互偷窃的功能。当然,除了偷窃物品之外,还有其他类型的偷窃。有些游戏存在“杀戮窃取”的问题。例如,在《无尽的任务》的初始版本中,只有对敌人进行最后一击的玩家才能获得经验值。恶意破坏者会习惯性地站在战斗附近,等待强大的怪物几乎被击败,然后偷偷进行致命一击,“窃取”所有经验值。再次强调,很少有玩家会把这当作一种有效的策略,但许多人这样做是为了获得破坏的乐趣。创建系统让玩家难以夺取不属于他们的东西是让破坏变得困难的一种方法。

  • Stealing: In many games, items give players a great deal of power. Any opportunity to rob others of this power is very attractive to griefers. This could be through pickpocketing or by “looting” a player after battling them. Being stolen from really makes a player feel violated, and as a result, griefers love doing it. Unless you are planning to make a game that is fun for griefers and frustrating for everyone else, you probably don’t want to support features that let players steal from each other. Of course, there are other kinds of stealing than just stealing items. Some games have a problem with “kill stealing.” In the initial version of EverQuest, for example, only the player who dealt the final blow against an enemy would get any experience points for it. Griefers would make a habit of standing nearby a battle, waiting for a powerful monster to be nearly defeated, and then sneak in a killing blow, “stealing” all the experience. Again, few players did this as a valid strategy, but many did it for the joy of griefing. Creating systems that make it difficult for players to seize things that are not rightfully theirs is one way to make griefing difficult.

  • 交易:如果你给玩家提供交易物品的机会,你就设置了不公平交易的可能性。如果玩家掌握了他们将收到的物品的全部信息,就很难利用该系统进行恶意破坏。但如果有任何方法可以歪曲你试图交易的物品,恶意破坏者就会抓住机会进行不公平交易。

  • Trading: If you give players the opportunity to trade items, you set up the possibility of unfair trades. If players have total information about the items they will receive, it is difficult to use the system for griefing. But if there is any way to misrepresent items that you are trying to trade, griefers will pounce and use it as an opportunity to make unfair trades.

  • 粗言秽语:恶意破坏者喜欢在其他玩家面前使用令人震惊和不安的语言。如果您设置了针对此类语言的过滤器,恶意破坏者就会想方设法绕过您的过滤系统,如果您使用“黑名单”(禁止使用某些词)或“白名单”(仅允许使用某些词)或任何其他类型的自动聊天过滤器,他们几乎总能找到绕过过滤系统的方法,因为人类的大脑比任何机器都更善于检测模式。阻止此类恶意破坏的最成功系统是使用自动过滤器结合允许玩家举报粗鲁行为的系统。语音聊天使这个问题变得更加棘手,但随着语音识别的兴起,这种情况开始发生。有趣的是,Xbox One 上的 NBA 2K14 在麦克风拾取到口头粗言秽语时会给出“技术犯规”。限制淫秽恶意破坏的另一种好方法是使用镜头 #63反馈。请记住,淫秽内容对恶意破坏者来说只是一场游戏,如果你不给他们反馈,让他们知道是否淫秽过滤是否有效。只需让他们看到自己这边的淫秽内容,并适当过滤发送给其他玩家的信息即可。他们仍然可以找到方法打败这个系统,但这需要付出更多努力,而且乐趣会少很多。

  • Obscenities: One thing griefers enjoy is using shocking and disturbing language in front of other players. If you set up filters for this kind of language, it will become a game for griefers to find ways around your filtering system, and they almost always can, if you are using a “black list” (certain words are forbidden) or “white list” (only certain words are allowed), or any other kind of automated chat filter, because the human mind is so much better at detecting patterns than any machine. The most successful systems for stopping this kind of griefing are the ones that use an automated filter combined with a system that lets players report rude behavior. Voice chat makes this a much harder problem, but with the rise of voice recognition, it’s starting to happen. Amusingly, NBA 2K14 on Xbox One gave “technical fouls” when the microphone picks up spoken foul language. Another good technique to limit obscene griefing comes from using Lens #63: Feedback. Keeping in mind that obscenities are a game to the griefer, you can take the fun out of the game by giving them no feedback about whether the obscenity filter worked or not. Simply let them see the obscenity on their side, and filter the message appropriately to the other players. They can still find ways to beat this system, but it is much more work and much less fun.

  • 挡路:最简单、最令人讨厌的恶意破坏行为之一就是挡住玩家的去路,让玩家无法到达他们想要去的地方。解决这个问题的方法多种多样,从确保碰撞系统让玩家彼此擦肩而过,到创造足够宽的门道,让玩家无法被单个玩家阻挡,再到允许玩家推开其他玩家。在Toontown Online中,我们选择了最后一种解决方案。但即便如此,恶意破坏者也利用了这一点!由于玩家可以互相推搡,因此,找到一个“被遗弃的化身”(玩家离开键盘后)并慢慢地将他们推到街上并投入战斗,这成了一个流行的恶作剧!

  • Blocking the way: One of the simplest and most annoying griefing moves is to bar the way so that players can’t get where they are trying to go. Solutions to this problem range from making sure the collision system lets players slip past each other, to creating doorways wide enough that they cannot be blocked by a single player, to allowing players to push other players out of the way. In Toontown Online, we chose this last solution. But, even then, the griefers took advantage! Since players could push each other around, it became a popular prank to find an “abandoned avatar,” whose player had stepped away from the keyboard and push them slowly down the street and into a battle!

  • 漏洞:可能破坏者最大的乐趣就是在游戏系统中发现漏洞,让他们做一些他们不应该做的事情。如果破坏者可以在战斗中断开连接,让其他玩家无法获得宝贵的宝藏,他们就会这么做。如果他们可以偶尔在角落里跳上跳下两个小时,导致服务器崩溃,他们就会这么做。如果他们可以在公共场所摆放家具,拼写淫秽的单词,他们就会这么做。如果他们找到窃取资源的方法,他们肯定会这么做。他们为了破坏或骚扰而做的任何事都会让他们感到强大和重要,特别是当其他玩家不知道如何做的时候。你必须时刻注意这些漏洞,并在出现漏洞时小心地将其移除。处理这样的问题是制作在线多人游戏如此艰巨的部分原因。

  • Loopholes: Possibly the griefer’s greatest joy is to find a loophole in a game system that lets them do something that they shouldn’t be able to do. If griefers can disconnect during a battle to deny another player a valuable treasure, they will do it. If they can occasionally crash the server by jumping up and down in a corner for two hours, they will do it. If they can arrange furniture in a public place to spell obscene words, they will do it. And definitely if they find a way to steal resources, they will do it. Anything they can do to vandalize or annoy will make them feel powerful and important, particularly if other players don’t know how to do it. You must be ever mindful of these loopholes and careful to remove them whenever they turn up. Dealing with problems like this is part of why making online multiplayer games is such an arduous process.

游戏社区的未来

The Future of Game Communities

几个世纪以来,游戏社区一直是地球上生活的重要组成部分,主要是通过专业和业余运动队。随着我们进入互联网和社交媒体时代,新型游戏社区也变得越来越重要。在这个新时代,一个人的在线身份变得非常重要,而且非常个人化。选择在线昵称和身份已成为儿童和青少年的重要成年礼。大多数创建这些身份的人会终生保留它们。二十年前创建昵称的大多数人今天仍然使用相同的昵称,并且无意更改它。再加上人们可以获得的最富有表现力的在线体验是通过多人游戏世界这一事实,人们很容易想象未来玩家会在年幼时为游戏创建头像,随着年龄的增长,这些头像会成为他们个人和职业生活的一部分。正如今天的人们经常终生效忠某个特定的运动队一样,也许玩家在儿童时期加入的公会将影响他们一生的个人社交网络。当玩家去世时,这些在线身份和社交网络会发生什么?也许他们会被纪念在某种在线陵墓中,又或许我们的化身会比我们活得更久,并传给子孙后代,让我们未来的后代与祖先建立起一种奇特的联系。现在是创建在线游戏的激动人心的时刻,因为我们发明的新型社区可能会成为未来几个世纪人类文化的永久元素。

Game communities have been an important part of life on earth for centuries, mostly via sports teams, both professional and amateur. As we transition into the age of the Internet and social media, new kinds of game communities are becoming-important as well. In this new age, a person’s online identity becomes something important and intensely personal. Choosing an online handle and identity has become an important rite of passage for children and young teenagers. Most people who create these identities will retain them their entire lives. Most people who created a handle twenty years ago still use the same one today and have no intention of changing it. Combine this with the fact that the most expressive online experience one can have is through multiplayer game worlds and one can easily imagine a future where players will create avatars for games as young children that become part of their personal and professional lives as they grow older. Just as people today often have lifelong allegiance to a particular sports team, perhaps the guilds players join as children will influence their personal social networks for the rest of their lives. And what will happen to these online identities and social networks when players die? Perhaps they will be memorialized in some kind of online mausoleum, or perhaps our avatars will outlive us and be passed on to children and grandchildren, giving our future descendants a strange connection to their ancestors. It is an exciting time to be creating online games, for the new kinds of communities we invent may become permanent elements of human culture for centuries to come.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 网络社区建设:成功网络社区的秘密策略,作者:Amy Jo Kim。这本书虽然有点过时,但它仍然是我所知道的了解网络社区本质的最佳资源。

  • Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities by Amy Jo Kim. This book is slightly dated, but it still is the best resource I know for understanding the nature of online communities.

第二十 六章

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

设计师通常与团队合作

The Designer Usually Works with a Team



26.1

FIGURE

26.1

成功团队合作的秘诀

The Secret of Successful Teamwork

要制作现代电子游戏,需要一支多元化的团队。你需要一支拥有各种艺术、技术、设计和商业技能的团队。他们通常有着截然不同的背景,重视的东西也大不相同。但如果你想制作出一款出色的游戏,他们就必须齐心协力,抛开分歧和分歧,让游戏尽可能出色。

To create a modern videogame, a team of tremendous diversity is required. You need a team of people with a wide variety of artistic, technical, design, and business skills. They generally have very different backgrounds and value very different things. But if your game is going to be a great one, they will all have to pull together and set aside differences and disagreements to make the game as great as it can be.

所有成功合作并取得伟大成就的团队都分享了一个简单的秘密。这个秘密非常简单,当你听到它时,你可能会认为我不是认真的。但这是我在这本书中要说的最严肃的事情。

And there is a simple secret shared by all teams that have ever successfully collaborated to make something great. It is so simple that when you hear it, you will likely think I’m not being serious. But this is the most serious thing I will say in this book.

成功的团队合作的秘诀是爱。

The secret to successful teamwork is love.

不完全是。

No, really.

现在,我这样说并不是说,只要队员手拉手唱“Kumbaya”,你们就能打出一场精彩的比赛。我甚至不是说你必须喜欢队里的其他人,尽管这不会有什么坏处。

Now, by this, I don’t mean that if the team hold hands and sings “Kumbaya,” you are going to make a great game. I don’t even mean that you have to like the other people on the team, although it wouldn’t hurt.

我的意思是你必须热爱你正在制作的游戏。因为如果团队中的每个人都对他们共同制作的游戏和他们为之制作的游戏的受众怀有深厚而真诚的热爱,那么所有的分歧和分歧都会被搁置一旁,以打造出游戏并让它尽可能精彩。

What I mean is that you have to love the game you are making. For if everyone on the team has a deep and true love for the game they are making together and for the audience they are making it for, all differences and disagreements will be set aside in service of bringing the game into existence and making it be as wonderful as it can possibly be.

有幸加入一支真正热爱自己所开发游戏的团队的开发者会明白我的意思。团队中的每个人都像期待圣诞节的孩子一样,想到游戏即将完成,他们就会一直想着这件事。

Developers lucky enough to have been on a team that truly loves the game they are making will know just what I mean. Everyone on the team feels like children anticipating Christmas when they think about the game getting finished and they think about that constantly.

同样,曾经在“缺乏爱”的团队中工作过的开发者也会明白我的意思。团队对游戏缺乏爱主要有三种问题:

Similarly, developers who have been on a team that had some kind of “love deficit” will also know what I mean. There are three main kinds of problems when it comes to team love for their game:

  • 爱情问题 #1:团队成员无法热爱任何游戏。虽然很难理解,但有些人即使对游戏或玩游戏的人没有特别的热爱,也会进入游戏行业。当这样的人在你的团队中时,就像背负着沉重的负担。他们通常贡献甚少,而且总是浪费时间与真正热爱工作的团队成员争论。不幸的是,负责管理或预算的团队成员最有可能患有这种疾病。无论如何,对于有这种问题的团队成员,只有一种解决办法:将他们从团队中除名。

  • Love problem #1: Team members incapable of loving any game. Though it is difficult to understand, some people get into the games business even though they have no particular love for games or the people who play them. When someone like this is on your team, it is like carrying deadweight. They often contribute little of use and constantly waste time arguing with team members who actually love the work. Unfortunately, the team members in charge of management or budget are most likely to have this affliction. Regardless, there is only one cure for a team member with this problem: get them off the team.

  • 热爱问题 #2:团队成员喜欢的游戏与他们正在制作的游戏不同。这个问题有多种形式和规模:一个只喜欢第一人称射击游戏的关卡设计师被迫开发角色扮演游戏;一个只喜欢具有尖端图形的游戏的工程师被迫开发简单的基于网络的游戏;以及一个热爱HR Giger 被迫开发一款以爱心熊为主题的新游戏。当你发现团队成员有这个问题时,关键是与他们合作,看看他们是否能爱上当前游戏的某些方面——或者他们可能对新功能或元素有一些想法,可以让当前游戏焕然一新。在上一章中我提到的海盗游戏中,我们很早就遇到了一个爱的问题。团队中的动画师热切地期待为游戏制作令人兴奋的海盗角色动画。但随着设计的进行,很明显这将是一个关于船的游戏——游戏中唯一的人会离你很远,而且非常小,无法做出任何有意义的动作或情感。动画师们试图与此抗争了一段时间,但逐渐意识到这是一场必输的战斗,他们显然开始失去对游戏的热爱,用安静超然的语气讨论它。我们团队中的一些人认为这是一个大问题——我们需要动画师全心全意地制作精美的动画效果,但他们似乎很失望,因为他们无法为角色制作动画,这似乎是不可能的。然后,在一次会议上,一切都变了。其中一位动画师带来了一大叠纸。“听着,我一直在考虑这个游戏,一开始,我很沮丧,因为我们删掉了所有的角色,但后来我开始想,这个节目的明星是船——我该怎么做才能让它们变得很酷?”然后他开始展示一页又一页的草图,画着船会如何爆炸成碎片,桅杆会如何破裂、折断并坠入大海,船帆在被炮弹击中时会如何撕裂、撕扯和​​拍打——这真的让每个人都很受鼓舞。其他动画师立刻兴奋地比赛看谁能想出最酷的效果。这种观点的转变使他们讨厌的项目变成了他们喜爱的项目,并且对游戏质量产生了巨大的影响。

  • Love problem #2: Team members in love with a different game than the one they are making. This problem comes in many shapes and sizes: a level designer who only loves first-person shooters, forced to work on a role-playing game; an engineer who only loves games with cutting-edge graphics, forced to work on a simple web-based game; and an artist who loves the work of H.R. Giger, forced to develop a new game featuring the Care Bears. When you find members of your team have this problem, the key is to work with them, to see if there is something about the current game that they can fall in love with—or perhaps they have some idea for a new feature or element that will take the current game somewhere new and different. On the pirates game I mentioned in an earlier chapter, we ran into a love problem early on. The animators on the team were eagerly looking forward to animating exciting pirate characters for the game. But as the design proceeded, it became clear that this would be a game about ships—the only people in it would be far away and so tiny as to be incapable of any meaningful action or emotion. The animators tried to fight this for a while but gradually realized it was a losing battle, and they clearly began losing their love for the game, discussing it in tones of quiet detachment. Several of us on the team saw this as a major problem—we needed the animators to put their heart and souls into making beautiful effects animations, but they seemed so disappointed they wouldn’t be able to animate characters, which didn’t seem possible. Then, in one meeting, everything changed. One of the animators brought a big sheaf of papers. “Look, I’ve been thinking about this game, and at first, I was really bummed that we cut all the characters, but then I started thinking the stars of this show are the ships—what could I do to make them cool?” He then proceeded to show pages and pages of sketches of how the ships would explode into pieces, how their masts would crack and break and crash into the sea, and how their sails would rip and tear and flap when hit with cannonballs—it was truly inspiring to everyone. Immediately, other animators were excitedly competing to see who could come up with the coolest effects. This shift in perspective turned a project they hated into one they loved, and it made a huge difference in game quality.

  • 爱情问题 #3:团队成员对同一款游戏有不同的看法。这是最常见、最具挑战性的爱情问题。在这种情况下,团队中充满了对开发游戏充满热情的人,但每个人对游戏的想法却大相径庭。避免这个问题的关键是尽快让每个人对设计达成共识。会有争论和分歧,但如果每个人都听取他们的意见并尊重地考虑其他人提出的想法,团队就可以朝着最重要的目标努力——所有团队成员都喜欢的共同愿景。但这只有在彻底沟通和尊重的情况下才能实现。一旦你感觉到会议上有人不认同某个想法(即使他们口头上说同意),你必须停下一切,找出原因,并设法让他们加入进来。如果你不这样做,他们可能会暗中不同意这个方向,并失去对游戏的热爱。当这种情况发生时,他们本应做出的宝贵贡献就失去了。除非得到团队的最终同意,否则任何决定都不应是最终决定。

  • Love problem #3: Team members in love with different visions of the same game. This is the most common, and the most challenging love problem. In this situation, a team is full of people passionate about building a game, but everyone has very different ideas about what the game will be like. The key to avoiding this problem is to get everyone on the same page about what the design is as soon as possible. There will be arguments and disagreements, but if everyone hears them out and respectfully considers the ideas that others present, the team can work toward that all-important thing—a shared vision of something that all the team members love. But it can only happen with thorough communication and respect. The moment you sense that someone in a meeting doesn’t buy into an idea (even if they verbally claim they agree with it), you must stop everything, find out why, and try to find a way to get them on board. If you don’t, they may secretly disagree with the direction and lose their love for the game. And when that happens, the valuable contributions they would have made are lost. No decision should be final until the team agrees that it is final.

如果你不能热爱比赛,那就热爱观众

If You Can’t Love the Game, Love the Audience

让其他人喜欢你的游戏是你作为设计师的责任之一。但是,当你意识到自己并不热爱你正在开发的游戏时,那该怎么办呢?同样,这不是你可以忽略或希望它能自行补救的事情。除非你找到一种热爱游戏的方法,否则你创造的游戏充其量也只是平庸之作,因为你贡献的不真诚会显露出来。所以当你对游戏的热爱消失时,你必须找到一种方法来恢复它。但是该怎么做呢?

Getting others to love the game is part of your responsibility as a designer. But what about that terrible situation when, horror of horrors, you realize that you yourself do not love the game you are working on? Again, this is not something you can ignore or hope will remedy itself. Unless you find a way to love your game, the game you create will be mediocre at best, because the insincerity of your contribution will show through. So when your love for your game lapses, you must find a way to restore it. But how?

如前所述,一种方法是花很长时间寻找游戏中你真正喜欢的东西——也许是某个时刻,或者是一个巧妙的机制,或者是一个漂亮的界面。如果你能找到一件让你兴奋和自豪的事情,有时这足以让你觉得整个项目值得——足以让你爱上这个游戏并努力让游戏成功。

One way, as mentioned earlier, is to search long and hard for something in the game that you do love—perhaps it is a moment, or a clever mechanic, or a slick interface. If you can find just one thing that you are excited about and can be proud of, it can sometimes be enough to make the whole project worthwhile for you—enough to make you love the game and work hard to make the game succeed.

但也许你找不到那件值得爱的东西,也许是因为你不是这款游戏的目标受众。在这种情况下,不要把它看作是为你而设的游戏——而是把它看作是它真正的本质,一款为目标受众而设的游戏。想想你曾经为送给你爱的人一份特别的礼物而做了大量的准备。想想当他们打开礼物看到礼物时,你脸上的表情是多么的兴奋。对这一刻的期待让你在礼物的选择、包装和展示上投入了如此多的精力。你精心设计了那一刻,因为你爱那个人,你想看到他们如此幸福的那一刻。是什么让他们如此快乐?仅仅是礼物?当然不是。让他们如此快乐的是,你如此爱他们,以至于你为他们创造了那个特别的时刻。你投入到那一刻的爱闪耀在他们的心中。如果你能把这种爱投入到你为你的受众创造的游戏中,这种爱就会通过游戏闪耀到你的受众心中。游戏对他们来说会感觉很特别,因为他们意识到有人真的关心他们在玩游戏时的感受,知道有人关心你是一种非常特别的感觉。设计师无法伪造这种感觉——你必须真正感受到它。正如伟大的魔术师亨利·瑟斯顿曾经说过的:

But perhaps you can’t find that one thing to love, perhaps because you are not the target audience for the game. In that case, don’t think of it as a game for you—think of it as what it really is, a game for the intended audience. Think of a time when you went through a great deal of preparation to give someone you love a special gift. Think how excited you were about seeing the expression on their face when they opened it up and saw it. The anticipation of this moment made you put so much thoughtful energy into the gift choice, the wrapping, and the presentation of it. You carefully designed that moment, because you loved that person and you wanted to see that moment when they were so happy. And what was it that made them happy? Just the gift? Surely not. What made them so happy was that you loved them so much that you created that special moment just for them. The love you put into that moment shone through and into their hearts. If you can take that kind of love and put it into the game you are creating for your audience, the love will shine through the game and into the hearts of your audience. The game will feel special to them, as they realize that someone really cared how they would feel when they played the game, and knowing that someone cares about you is a very special feeling. A designer cannot fake this—you must really feel it. As the great magician Henry Thurston once said:

长期的经验告诉我,我成功的关键在于我能否向观众散发善意。只有一种方法可以做到这一点,那就是感受它。你可以欺骗观众的眼睛和思想,但你无法欺骗他们的心。

Long experience has taught me that the crux of my fortunes is whether I can radiate good will toward my audience. There is only one way to do it and that is to feel it. You can fool the eyes and minds of the audience, but you cannot fool their hearts.

如果连这个方法都对你不起作用,如果你发现你不仅不热爱你的游戏,而且你对你的观众也没有特别的爱,那么只剩下一件事了:假装。这听起来像是一件不真诚的事情。我们不是刚刚说过爱是不能伪装的吗?但是当我们假装热爱某样事物时,会发生一些奇怪的事情——有时真正的爱会开始出现。你是否曾经加入过一个必须一起完成一些枯燥任务的团队?也许是春季大扫除的日子。每个人都是对此感到恐惧和闷闷不乐。然后一个人半开玩笑地说:“来吧,各位,这会很棒的!我们会玩得很开心的!”每个人都对这讽刺轻笑,只是为了好玩,开始以假装“这会很棒”的态度对待这项活动。而只是通过假装这样,很快活动就开始变得有趣了——讽刺的是,每个人都开始喜欢它。如果你不知道如何爱某样东西,只需问问自己,真正热爱这项游戏的人会说些什么、做些什么,然后开始做那些事。你可能会对自己开始发生的转变感到惊讶。

If even this does not work for you, if you find that not only do you not love your game, but you have no particular love for your audience, only one thing remains: to pretend. This sounds like an insincere thing to do. Didn’t we just say that love cannot be faked? But something strange happens when we pretend to love things—sometimes real love starts to emerge. Have you ever been part of a group that has to do some dreary task together? Perhaps a day of spring cleaning. Everyone is dreading it and moping about it. Then one person says, half-jokingly, “Come on, everybody, this is gonna be awesome! We’re going to have so much fun!” Everyone chuckles at the sarcasm and, just for fun, starts approaching the activity with a pretend “this is going to be awesome” attitude. And just by pretending this, soon the activity does start to become fun—and ironically, everyone starts to love it. If you don’t know how to love something, just ask yourself what kinds of things someone who really loved the game would say and do, and start doing those things. You may be surprised at the transformation that starts to take place within yourself.

再次重申,我完全真诚地说,团队对游戏的热爱是决定团队能否成功的最重要因素。热爱不是奢侈品——如果你希望制作出一款出色的游戏,热爱就是必需品。

Again, I am completely sincere when I say that team love for the game is the most important factor determining whether the team will succeed. Love is not a luxury—it is a necessity if you are to have any hope at all of producing a great game.

共同设计

Designing Together

我们忘记了咒语的一个重要变体:

We forgot one important variation on our magic words:

我是一名游戏设计师。

I am a game designer.

如果团队中的每个人都喜欢这个项目,那很好!但这会给你带来一个新问题——每个人都会对设计有自己的看法!对于一些设计师来说,这很可怕——团队中其他成员想要贡献设计想法的想法威胁到了他们作为设计师的地位,并使他们处于这样一种境地:他们不得不与其他人争论游戏的“正确”设计。这些设计师经常选择退出团队,无视这些意见,并制作出完全独立于团队其他成员的设计。其结果是可以预见的:每个团队成员对游戏的所有美好想法都被粉碎了,他们对游戏的热爱也枯竭了。设计师对团队感到失望,因为他们似乎不愿意也无法实现设计师的宏伟愿景,而正如你所预料的那样,游戏并没有让任何人满意。

If everyone on the team loves the project, that’s great! But it gives you a new problem—everyone is going to have opinions about the design! For some designers, this is terrifying—the idea that other members of the team want to contribute design ideas threatens their status as designer and puts them in a position where they have to argue with others about the “right” design for the game. These designers often choose to withdraw from the team, ignore these opinions, and produce a design completely independent from the rest of the team. The effect is predictable: all the beautiful ideas that each team member had for the game have been crushed, and the love they had for the game dries up and blows away. The designer becomes frustrated with the team because they seem unwilling and unable to realize the designer’s glorious vision, and the game, as you might expect, pleases no one.

更成功的方法是尽可能让团队参与设计过程。如果你能放下自尊,你很快就会意识到,团队中大多数有设计想法的人并不想劫持游戏设计——他们只是希望他们的想法被听到,因为他们也希望游戏很棒!如果你让每个人都参与设计过程,认真对待每一个想法和建议,你就会

A much more successful approach is to include the team whenever possible in the design process. If you can set your ego aside, you will quickly realize that most of the people on the team with design ideas don’t want to hijack the game design—they just want their ideas to be heard, because they, too, want the game to be great! If you include everyone in the design process, taking every idea and suggestion seriously, you will

  • 有更多想法可供选择

  • Have more ideas to choose from

  • 快速剔除错误的想法

  • Weed out flawed ideas quickly

  • 被迫从多个角度观看比赛

  • Be forced to view the game from many perspectives

  • 让团队中的每个人都感觉自己拥有这个设计

  • Make everyone on the team feel like they own the design

当整个团队都参与设计时,您的游戏将更加强大,每个人都会满怀信心地着手实施,因为他们理解设计。这非常重要,因为并非所有的设计决策都是提前做出的。数百个微小的决定总是在进行中——不是由设计师做出的,而是由从事游戏工作的程序员、艺术家和高管做出的。如果所有这些人都对游戏设计有一个坚实的、共同的理解,这些小决定都会加强游戏的设计,项目将具有统一的稳健性和坚固性,这是其他任何方式都无法实现的。项目中的许多不同人都觉得他们的贡献是游戏中最重要的部分,这并不罕见——而且也不错!这只是意味着许多不同的团队成员对该游戏感到个人所有权和责任。增强这种感觉的一个好方法是避免“过度充实”您的设计。如果你在游戏的细节设计中留下一些模糊性,尤其是那些你不确定的部分,这会迫使从事该部分游戏的开发人员思考该部分游戏应该是什么样子,并想出如何实现这些细节的想法。由于他们通常最接近游戏的这一部分,他们对细节设计的直觉通常相当好——如果他们的想法很好并被运用到游戏中,他们会为拥有游戏的这些部分而感到真正的自豪。

When the whole team participates in the design, your game will be stronger, and everyone will embark on implementation with confidence that they understand the design. This is very important, because not all design decisions get made ahead of time. Hundreds of tiny decisions get made all the time—not by the designer but by the programmers, artists, and executives working on the game. If all of these people have a solid, shared understanding of the game design, these little decisions will all reinforce the design of the game, and the project will have a unified robustness and solidity that it can’t get any other way. It is not uncommon for many different people on a project to feel that their contribution was the most important part of the game—and not unhealthy, either! This just means that many different team members feel personal ownership and responsibility for that game. One great way to amplify this feeling is to avoid “overfleshing” your designs. If you leave some ambiguity in the detailed design of your game, particularly for parts you aren’t sure about, it forces the developers working on that section of the game to think about what that section of the game should be like and to come up with ideas for how to implement those fine details. Since they are often closest to that part of the game, their instincts about detailed design are often quite good—and if their ideas are good ones and go into the game, they will feel real pride of ownership of those parts of the game.

这是否意味着你必须让每个人都参与到设计中?不是每个人都有精力花三个小时来讨论如何正确布局库存界面,因此对于详细的讨论,你可能需要根据团队中谁对这类会议感兴趣且富有成效来建立一个核心设计团队。但在这个核心团队达成共识之后关于设计应该如何工作,你应该尽快向其他人展示这些想法。一个典型的过程如下所示:

Does this mean you have to have everyone involved in the design all the time? Not everyone has the stamina to spend three hours debating the right way to lay out the inventory interface, so for detailed discussions, you will probably want to establish a core design team based on who on the team is both interested and productive at these kinds of sessions. But after this core team has come to consensus about how a design should work, you should present these ideas to the rest as soon as possible. A typical process looks something like the following:

  1. 初步头脑风暴:让尽可能多的团队成员参与进来。

  2. Initial brainstorming: Involves as much of the team as possible.

  3. 独立设计:核心设计团队成员独立思考想法。

  4. Independent design: Core design team members think about ideas independently.

  5. 设计讨论:核心设计成员将各自独立的想法聚集在一起进行讨论,并尝试达成想法共识。

  6. Design discussion: Core design members bring their independent ideas together to discuss and try to come to consensus on ideas.

  7. 设计展示:核心设计团队向整个团队展示他们的进展,留出时间进行评论和批评。这会发现新问题,并经常演变成头脑风暴,从而启动下一轮迭代周期。

  8. Design presentation: The core design team presents their progress to the whole team, allowing time for comments and criticism. This identifies new problems and often turns into brainstorming, kicking off the next round of the iterative cycle.

让整个团队参与设计需要时间和精力,但你会发现,从长远来看,只要你的团队能够沟通,这会让游戏变得更强大。

It takes both time and energy to involve the whole team in the design, but you will find that it makes the game stronger in the long run, provided your team is able to communicate.

团队沟通

Team Communication

团队合作不是一种美德,而是一种选择。

—帕特里克·兰奇奥尼

Teamwork is not a virtue. It is a choice.

—Patrick Lencioni

关于如何促进良好的团队沟通,已经有数百本书。我将在这里总结出十个与游戏设计特别相关的关键问题。你可能认为这些事情听起来很基础,确实如此——但掌握基础知识对于任何领域的卓越发展都是必不可少的,尤其是像团队进行游戏设计这样复杂的领域。事不宜迟,团队沟通的十个关键如下:

Hundreds of books have been written about how to facilitate good team communication. I’m going to boil it down here to ten key issues that are particularly pertinent for game design. You might think these things sound basic, and they are—but mastery of the basics is essential for excellence in any field, especially something as complicated as game design by a team. Without further ado, the ten keys to team communication are as follows:

  1. 客观性:之所以列在第一位,是因为它最容易出错。在设计狂喜的激情中,很容易对一个像天上闪电一样击中你的想法产生依赖。但是,如果其他团队成员不喜欢你的想法,那么你在哪里呢?如果你要打一场意见和直觉的战争,那你就无处可去。拯救你的工具是镜头 #14问题陈述。它可以给你所需的客观性。所有团队讨论都必须关注精心设计的想法如何解决手头的问题。个人对这些想法的偏好并不重要——重要的是这些想法是否解决了问题。甚至不要把这个想法称为“我的想法”或“苏的想法”——要客观地说:“宇宙飞船的想法”。这不仅会将想法与个人分开(将它们交给团队),而且也会更清晰。另一个不错的技巧(我从兰迪·波许那里学到的)是将替代方案表述为问题。例如,不要说“A 不好。我更喜欢 B”,而要简单地说“如果我们选择 B 而不是 A 会怎么样?”让团队集体讨论 B 和 A 的相对优点。这是一个微妙的差异,但掌握团队沟通的大部分内容都是微妙的。如果你作为一名设计师能够养成客观的良好习惯,每个人都会毫不犹豫地向你提出设计问题,因为他们知道当你“评判”设计时,不会出现尴尬的局面——他们只会得到诚实、客观、有用的反馈。此外,人们会希望你参加每一次设计会议,因为通过为房间带来客观的基调,你的存在有助于缓解态度不太客观的人之间的紧张斗争。最重要的是,当团队设计会议具有客观的基调时,每个想法都会被认真对待,这意味着即使是害羞的团队成员也会觉得他们可以畅所欲言,许多可能隐藏在阴影中颤抖的想法将自信地浮出水面。

  2. Objectivity: This one is listed first because it is the most likely to go wrong. In the passionate throes of design ecstasy, it is easy to become attached to an idea that struck you like white lightning from heaven. But if other team members don’t like your idea, where are you then? Nowhere, if you are going to fight a war of opinions and gut feelings. The tool that will rescue you is Lens #14: Problem Statement. It can give you the objectivity you need. All team discussion must focus on how well-designed ideas solve the problems at hand. Personal preferences about these ideas don’t matter—all that matters is whether the ideas solve the problem. Don’t even talk about the idea as “my idea” or “Sue’s idea”—speak objectively: “The spaceship idea.” Not only will this separate the ideas from the individuals (giving them over to the team), but it will be clearer, as well. Another nice trick (which I learned from Randy Pausch) is to phrase alternatives as questions. For example, instead of saying “A is no good. I like B better,” simply saying “What if we did B instead of A?” lets the group collectively discuss the relative merits of B and A. It’s a subtle difference, but much about mastering team communication is subtle. If you can develop good habits of objectivity as a designer, everyone will bring you design questions to answer without hesitation, because they know there is no danger of an awkward situation when you “pass judgment” on the design—they will just get honest, objective, useful feedback. Further, people will want to include you in every design session, because by bringing a tone of objectivity to the room, your presence can help defuse tense struggles between people taking a less objective attitude. And best of all, when a team design session has a tone of objectivity, every idea is taken seriously, which means that even shy team members will feel they can speak freely, and many ideas that might have hidden, trembling in the shadows, will confidently come to light.

  3. 清晰度:这一点很简单。如果沟通不清晰,就会造成混乱。当你解释某件事时,看看人们是否理解你的意思。尽可能阐明你的想法。如果别人说的话不清楚,不要假装你明白他们在说什么。无论你有多尴尬,都要继续提问,直到你明白他们的意思。因为如果设计团队中的每个人都意见不一致,怎么会有有意义的交流呢?但相互理解只是清晰度的一半——另一半是具体和明确。对你的制作人说“我将在周四之前设计战斗系统”和说“我将在本周四下午 5 点之前通过电子邮件向你发送一份 3-5 页的回合制战斗系统界面描述”之间有很大的不同。前者为沟通不畅敞开了大门,而后者提供了有关特定可交付成果的重要细节,几乎没有误解的余地。

  4. Clarity: This one is simple. If communication is not clear, there is going to be confusion. When you explain something, check to see if people understand what you mean. Illustrate your ideas when possible. And if someone else says something that isn’t clear, don’t ever pretend you understand what they are saying. No matter how embarrassed you are, keep asking questions until you understand what they mean. Because if everyone on the design team isn’t on the same page, how can there be any meaningful communication? But understanding each other is only half of clarity—the other half is getting concrete and specific. There is a big difference between saying to your producer “I’ll design the combat system by Thursday” and saying “I’ll e-mail you a 3–5-page description of the interface for the turn-based combat system by this Thursday at 5 p.m.” The first throws wide the door for miscommunication, but the second gives important details about a specific deliverable, leaving little room for misunderstanding.

  5. 坚持:把事情写下来!我说了!口头交流是瞬间的——很容易被误解和遗忘。记录下来的事情以后团队中的每个人都可以检查。你应该使用所有对你有用的持久媒介——笔记本、电子邮件、论坛、邮件列表、文件共享、维基、打印文档等。确保每次设计会议都有人做笔记,可以与团队分享。在许多团队中,制作人承担着这一责任。当你发送有关设计主题的电子邮件时,一定要让团队中的每个人都参与进来。这可以避免人们被排除在外,甚至只是感到被排除在外的危险。

  6. Persistence: WRITE THINGS DOWN! There, I said it! Verbal communication is momentary—easily misunderstood and forgotten. Things that are recorded can be checked later by everyone on the team. And you should use every persistent medium that might be useful to you—notebooks, e-mail, forums, mailing lists, fileshares, wikis, printed documents, etc. Make sure someone in every design meeting is taking notes that can be shared with the team. On many teams, the producer is charged with this responsibility. When you do send an e-mail about a design topic, make sure to include everyone on the team. This avoids the danger of people being left out or even just feeling left out.

  7. 舒适度:我知道这个听起来有点傻。舒适度和沟通有什么关系?简单来说就是:当人们感到舒适时,他们就不会那么分心,沟通也会更加自由。确保你的团队有一个安静、温度适宜、有足够的椅子、有宽阔书写面的交流场所;简而言之,这是一个身体上舒适的地方。此外,你需要确保团队成员不会感到饥饿、口渴或过度疲劳。身体不舒服的人沟通起来会很糟糕。身体上的舒适是不够的——他们还必须在情感上感到舒适,这就引出了我们的下一个问题。

  8. Comfort: I know this one sounds a little silly. What does comfort have to do with communication? Simply this: when people are comfortable, they are less distracted and communicate more freely. Make sure your team has a place to communicate that is quiet and with the right temperature, has enough chairs, and has a large writing surface; in short, it is a place that is physically comfortable. Also, you need to make sure team members aren’t hungry, thirsty, or overtired. People who are physically uncomfortable will be terrible communicators. And physical comfort isn’t enough—they must also be emotionally comfortable, which leads us to our next item.

  9. 尊重:我们讨论过,成为一名优秀设计师的秘诀是成为一名优秀的倾听者。那么,优秀倾听的秘诀就是尊重你正在倾听的人。感觉不到被尊重的人往往很少说话,而且当他们说话时,他们往往不诚实地表达自己的感受,因为他们害怕受到严厉的评判。感觉受到尊重的人说话自由、公开、诚实。尊重他人很容易,只要你能记住这一点。只要在任何时候,以你希望被对待的方式对待他们。不要打断他们的话或翻白眼,即使你认为他们说的话很愚蠢。随时保持礼貌和耐心。找一些好听的话说,即使你需要稍微夸张一点。记住,其他人和你相似的地方比和你不同的地方多——寻找你们的共同点,因为尊重像我们这样的人是最容易的。当其他一切都失败时,对自己重复这句咒语:“如果我错了怎么办?”如果你以某种方式侮辱或冒犯了某人,不要急于为自己所说的话辩护。赶紧道歉,而且要真诚。因为如果你能始终尊重你的队友,他们也会不由自主地尊重你。当每个人都感到被尊重时,他们就会以最佳状态进行沟通。

  10. Respect: We have discussed how the secret to being a good designer is to be a good listener. Well, the secret to good listening is to respect the person you are listening to. People who do not feel respected tend to speak little, and when they do speak, they often are not honest about their feelings, for fear they will be judged harshly. People who feel respected speak freely, openly, and honestly. Respecting people is easy, if you can remember to do it. Simply treat them, at every moment, how you would like to be treated. Don’t cut them off or roll your eyes, even if you think what they are saying is foolish. Be polite and patient at all times. Find nice things to say, even if you have to stretch a little. Keep in mind that others are more like you than unlike you—look for things you have in common, for it is easiest to respect people like ourselves. When all else fails, repeat this mantra to yourself: “What if I’m wrong?” If you somehow insult or offend someone, do not rush to defend what you have said. Rush instead to apologize and do so sincerely. For if you can manage to respect your teammates at all times, they cannot help but respect you. And when everyone feels respected, they will communicate at their best.

  11. 信任:没有信任,尊重就不可能实现,反之亦然——如果我不能相信你所说和所做的,我怎么知道你是否尊重我?信任不是单靠信念就能起作用的——信任关系是随着时间的推移逐渐建立起来的。因此,沟通的质量远不如沟通的数量重要。日复一日见面、不断交谈、不断一起解决问题的人,逐渐了解他们可以在多大程度上信任对方,以及何时信任对方。一群几乎不认识对方、每月只见一次面的人根本不知道谁可以信任谁。这是数字通信不够好的一个领域——面对面交流的细微差别让我们能够潜意识地决定如何以及何时信任他人。找出团队中谁信任谁的最简单方法是观察谁一起吃午饭。大多数动物对与谁一起吃饭非常挑剔,人类也不例外。如果艺术家和程序员分开吃饭,那么团队很有可能出现流水线问题。如果 Xbox 团队与 PlayStation 团队分开吃饭,那么移植问题就经常会出现。请让您的团队有充分的机会聚在一起并相互交流,即使他们谈论的不是与您的项目有关的事情,因为您的团队可以进行的高速通信(关于任何事情!)越多,他们就越能学会如何相互信任——这就是为什么很少有游戏工作室拥有单独的办公室,而是更喜欢让团队坐在一起,在开放式办公室里,他们不得不整天面对面地交流。

  12. Trust: Respect is impossible without trust, and vice versa—if I can’t trust what you say and do, how can I know whether you respect me? Trust is not something that works on faith alone—relationships of trust gradually build up over time. For this reason, the quality of communication matters much less than the quantity of communication. People who see each other day in and day out, constantly talking, constantly solving problems together, gradually learn how much they can trust each other, and when. A group of people who barely know each other and only meet once a month have no idea who can be trusted with what. This is one area where digital communication isn’t good enough—there is something in the nuance of face-to-face communication that allows us to make subconscious decisions about how and when to trust people. The easiest way to figure out who trusts who on a team is to observe who eats lunch together. Most animals are very selective about who they eat with, and humans are no exception. If the artists eat separately from the programmers, there is a good chance the team has pipeline problems. If the Xbox team eats separately from the PlayStation team, there are often porting problems. Give your team every opportunity to be together and to communicate together, even if it is not about things to do with your project, for the more high-bandwidth communication (about anything!) that your team can have, the more they will learn how to trust each other—this is the reason so few game studios have individual offices, preferring instead to seat teams together in open offices where they can’t help but have constant face-to-face communication with one another all day long.

  13. 诚实:正如舒适取决于尊重,尊重取决于信任一样,信任取决于诚实。如果你在某个领域以不诚实而闻名,即使这与游戏设计或开发无关,其他人也会害怕对你诚实,这会阻碍团队沟通。游戏开发有时会变得非常政治化,你肯定会有时你必须对某些事情夸大其词——但你的团队必须始终确信他们从你那里得到的是真相,否则团队沟通就会变得紧张。

  14. Honesty: Just as comfort depends on respect and respect depends on trust, trust depends on honesty. If you have somehow developed a reputation for dishonesty in some area, even if it has nothing to do with game design or development, others will be afraid to be honest with you, which will inhibit team communication. Game development can sometimes get very political, and you will surely have to stretch the truth about some things from time to time—but your team must always feel certain they are getting the truth from you, or team communication will be strained.

  15. 隐私:诚实并不总是容易的,因为有时真相会让人痛苦。尽管我们都希望在设计工作中保持客观,但有时个人的骄傲和自负必然会纠缠在我们的工作中。在公共论坛上诚实地谈论这些事情可能很困难甚至不可能。人们在一对一的谈话中会比在公共场合更容易告诉你他们的真实感受。尽可能花时间与团队的每个成员私下交谈——他们通常会提出想法并讨论他们只是不愿意公开讨论的问题。这些一对一的对话也有助于建立信任,形成良性循环:更多的信任会带来更诚实的沟通,这又会带来更多的信任,等等。

  16. Privacy: Being honest isn’t always easy, because sometimes the truth can be painful. And even though we all hope to stay objective in our design work, there are times when personal pride and ego are necessarily tangled up in our work. Talking about these things honestly in a public forum can be difficult or impossible. People will tell you their true feelings in a one-on-one conversation much more easily than in public. Take the time to speak privately with each member of the team when you can—they will often present ideas and discuss problems they simply did not feel comfortable discussing publicly. These one-on-one conversations also go a long way to help build trust, as well, creating a virtuous circle: more trust leads to more honest communication, which leads to still more trust, and so on.

  17. 团结:在设计过程中,对于什么才是适合游戏的,会出现许多相互矛盾的意见和争论。这是健康而自然的。但最终,团队必须达成每个人都同意的决定。请记住,分歧需要两个人共同解决。如果团队中的一名成员在某一点上固执己见,你必须给予他们应有的尊重,并与他们合作,直到找到有意义的妥协。让他们解释为什么这一点对他们如此重要,通常可以让团队的其他成员理解为什么这一点很重要。当这不起作用时,一个很好的问题是“需要什么才能让你加入?”你可能无法立即解决这种意见分歧,但你不能忽视它。英特尔有一句很棒的短语,他们在这种情况下使用:“不同意并坚持”。我们不能总是就最佳路径达成一致,但我们可以就我们现在要做的事情达成一致。为了团队团结,团队成员有时需要能够同意走一条他们不同意的路。如果他们做不到这一点,就会在比赛中表现出来。就像汽车发动机中一个气缸不点火会使性能减半并最终损坏发动机一样,一个不认同设计的团队成员会减慢团队中每个人的努力,最终可能导致团队分裂。沟通的目的是为了团结。

  18. Unity: During the design process, there will be many conflicting opinions and arguments about what is right for the game. This is healthy and natural. Ultimately, though, the team must arrive at a decision everyone agrees upon. Keep in mind that it takes two people to have a disagreement. If one member of the team is stubborn on a particular point, you must treat them with the respect they deserve and work with them until a meaningful compromise can be found. Asking them to explain why this point is so important to them can often make the rest of the team understand why the point is important. When this fails, an excellent question to ask is, “What would it take to bring you in?” You may not be able to settle this difference in opinion immediately, but the one thing you cannot do is ignore it. Intel has a wonderful phrase they use in these situations: “disagree and commit.” We can’t always agree on the best path, but we can come to agreement on what we are going to do right now. Team members need to sometimes be able to agree to go down a path they don’t agree with for the sake of team unity. If they can’t do this, it will show in the game. Just as a single cylinder not firing in a car engine cuts performance in half and ultimately ruins the engine, one team member who does not buy into the design slows the efforts of everyone on the team and can, in the end, tear the team apart. The goal of communication is unity.

  19. 热爱:这条链条还能通向何方?它确实是一条链条。如果没有客观性、清晰度、坚持不懈、舒适感、尊重、信任、诚实、隐私和团结,团队对游戏的热爱就会受到威胁。但是如果你拥有所有这些东西,团队对游戏的热爱就会闪耀出来,你别无选择,只能制作出一款令人难以置信的游戏。

  20. Love: Where else could this chain possibly lead? And it is indeed a chain. Without objectivity, clarity, persistence, comfort, respect, trust, honesty, privacy, and unity, the love a team has for the game will be jeopardized. But if you have all these things, the team’s love for the game will shine through, and you will have no choice but to make an incredible game.

游戏设计和开发很难。除非你多才多艺,而且你的项目很小,否则你无法独自完成。人比创意更重要,因为,用皮克斯的 Ed Catmull 的话来说,“如果你把一个好主意交给一个平庸的团队,他们会把它搞砸。如果你把一个平庸的想法交给一个好的团队,他们会把它改正。”

Game design and development are hard. Unless you are multitalented and your project is tiny, you can’t do it alone. People are more important than ideas, because, in the words of Pixar’s Ed Catmull, “If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they’ll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they’ll fix it.”

你可能会认为,所有这些团队讨论都与设计无关,如果团队中的其他人没有做好自己的工作,那也与你作为设计师无关。这也许是真的,但它与所创造的游戏息息相关。由于每个接触游戏的人都会对其设计产生一定的影响,因此,如果你所分享的美好愿景要得以实现,你需要团队中的每个人齐心协力。

You might think that all this team talk has nothing to do with design and that if other people on the team don’t do their jobs, it has nothing to do with you as a designer. And that may be true, but it has everything to do with the game that gets created. Since everyone who touches a game exerts some influence on its design, you need everyone on the team to pull together, if the glorious vision you share is ever to come to light.

现在,随着整个团队沟通的进行,有人将编写一些文件——这就是我们下一章的主题。

Now, with all this team communication going on, someone is going to write some documents—and that is the subject of our next chapter.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

第二 十七章

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

团队有时通过文档进行沟通

The Team Sometimes Communicates through Documents



27.1

FIGURE

27.1

游戏设计文档的神话

The Myth of the Game Design Document

许多新手游戏设计师和其他梦想家对游戏设计过程的工作方式有着有趣的看法。由于不熟悉循环规则,他们认为游戏设计过程涉及一位天才游戏设计师独自坐在键盘前,输入一份精彩绝伦的游戏设计文档。当这个杰作完成后,所需要做的就是将其交给一支由程序员和艺术家组成的称职团队,等待他们将这一闪亮的愿景变成现实。“如果我能找到游戏设计文档的正确格式就好了,”沮丧的准设计师想,“我也能成为一名专业的游戏设计师!我满脑子都是想法——但没有这个神奇的模板,我就无法设计游戏。”

Many novice game designers, and other dreamers, have an interesting vision of how the process of game design works. Not being acquainted with the Rule of the Loop, they believe that the process of game design involves a genius game designer sitting down alone at a keyboard and typing out a glorious and perfect game design document. When this masterpiece is complete, all that needs to be done is to hand it to a competent team of programmers and artists and wait for them to turn this shining vision into a reality. “If only,” the frustrated would-be designer thinks, “I could find out the proper format for a game design document, I could become a professional game designer too! I’m full of ideas—but without this magic template, there is no way for me to design games.”

对我来说,明确说明下一点非常重要,因此我将使用非常大的字体。请仔细听:

It is very important for me to be clear about this next point, so I am going to use a very large font. Please listen closely:

魔法模板不存在!

THE MAGIC TEMPLATE DOES NOT EXIST!

它从未存在过,也永远不会存在。任何告诉你不是这样的东西的人都是傻瓜或骗子。即使这样的事情确实存在,也不清楚它是否有用。考虑一下设计师 Jason VandenBerghe 对游戏设计文档的看法:

It never has existed, and it never will exist. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool or a liar. Even if such a thing did exist, it’s not clear that it would be helpful. Consider what designer Jason VandenBerghe has to say about game design documents:

GDD 的问题在于,它们在你编写时就已经过时了。设计文档是你当前关于如何让游戏变得更好的理论的表达……但除非你将这些理论付诸实践,否则你无法知道答案。不幸的是,我们本能地将官方文档视为规范、脚本或蓝图。它们不是——它们是理论。当你拥有一份文档时,有些人认为它是计划,有些人认为它是理论,有些人认为它是蓝图,那么邪恶就会随处可见。小团队可以通过大量的人际沟通来克服这些不平等……但大团队会面临更大的困难。

The trouble with GDDs is that they are literally out of date the moment you write them. Design documents are an expression of your current theories about what will make your game good… but until you see those theories in practice, you cannot know. Unfortunately, it is in our nature to treat official documents as though they were specifications, or scripts, or blueprints. They are not - they are theories. Evil abounds when you have a document that some people think is a plan, some people think is a theory, and some people think is a blueprint. Small teams can overcome these inequities through lots of interpersonal communication… but larger teams will have a much harder time.

这是否意味着文档不是游戏设计的一部分?不,文档是游戏设计中非常重要的一部分。但每个游戏和每个团队的文档都不同。要了解游戏文档的正确结构,您必须首先了解其用途。

Does this mean that documents are not a part of game design? No—documents are a very important part of game design. But documents are different for every game and different for every team. To understand the correct structure of the documents for your game, you must first understand their purpose.

文件的目的

The Purpose of Documents

游戏文档恰好有两个目的:记忆交流

Game documents have exactly two purposes: memory and communication.

记忆

Memory

人类的记忆力很差。游戏设计中充满了成千上万个重要的决策,这些决策决定了游戏的运作方式和原因。你很可能无法记住所有决策。当这些绝妙的想法在你的脑海中记忆犹新时,你可能会觉得它们不可能被忘记。但两周后,在做了两百个设计决策之后,即使是最巧妙的解决方案也很容易被忘记。如果你养成了记录设计决策的习惯,那么你就不用再一次解决同样的问题了。将设计过程从我有限的工作记忆中转移到文档中,可以帮助我更好地思考——在纸上或屏幕上发展一个想法可以帮助我充实一个创意。

Humans have terrible memories. A game design will be full of thousands of important decisions that define how the game works and why. There is a good chance you will not be able to remember them all. When these brilliant ideas are fresh in your mind, you will likely feel that they are impossible to forget. But two weeks and two hundred design decisions later, it is very easy to forget even the most ingenious of solutions. If you get in the habit of recording your design decisions, it will save you the trouble of having to solve the same problems all over again. And moving the design process from my limited working memory into a document helps me think better—developing an idea on paper or on screen helps me flesh out a creative idea.

沟通

Communication

即使你有完美的记忆力,你也必须将游戏设计的决定传达给团队中的许多其他人。文档是一种非常有效的方法。正如我们在第25 章团队中讨论的那样,这种沟通将是一种对话,因为一旦将决定写在纸上,就会有人发现其中的问题或想出改进的方法。文档可以让更多人更快地参与设计,从而更快地发现和修复游戏设计中的弱点。如此多的人需要查看和接触这些文档;很容易理解为什么 Google Docs 已成为编写和更新游戏文档的标准方式。

Even if you are blessed with a perfect memory, though, decisions about the design of your game must be communicated to many other people on the team. Documents are a very effective way to do that. And this communication, as we discussed in Chapter 25: Team, will be a dialog, for as soon as a decision is put on paper, someone will find a problem with it or come up with a way to make it better. Documents can get more minds on the design faster to more quickly find and fix weaknesses in the game design. So many people need to see and touch these documents; it’s easy to see why Google Docs has become the standard way to write and update game documents.

游戏文件类型

Types of Game Documents

由于文档的目的是为了记忆和交流,因此您需要的文档类型取决于需要记住什么和需要交流什么。很少有文档能够满足所有必要的目的 - 通常创建几种不同类型的文档是有意义的。有六种主要文档需要记住和交流不同的东西,每种文档都会生成自己特殊的文档类型。

Since the purpose of documents is for memory and communication, the types of documents you will need are defined by what needs to be remembered and what needs to be communicated. It is the rare game where one document serves all necessary purposes—usually it makes sense to create several different kinds of documents. There are six main groups that need to remember and communicate different things, and each generates its own special kind of documents.



27.2

FIGURE

27.2

上图显示了游戏设计团队中记忆和沟通的一些可能路径。每个箭头可以是一份文档或多份文档。让我们看看这六个组中的每一个以及他们可能创建的文档。

The preceding figure shows some possible paths of memory and communication on a game design team. Each arrow could be a document or more than one document. Let’s look at each of the six groups and what documents they might create.

设计

Design

  • 1.游戏设计概述:这份高级文档可能只有几页。它通常主要为管理层撰写,以便他们能够充分了解这款游戏是什么以及它适合谁,而无需过多细节。概述文档有助于整个团队了解游戏的总体情况。设计师 Stone Librande 给出了很好的建议:每个游戏都应该在海报上用图表来解释,说明整个游戏是如何组合在一起的。

  • 1. Game design overview: This high-level document might only be a few pages. It is often written primarily for management so that they can understand enough about what this game is and who it is for, without getting into too much detail. The overview document can be useful for the whole team to get a sense of the big picture of the game. Designer Stone Librande gives excellent advice: every game should be explainable in a diagram on a poster that explains how the whole game fits together.

  • 2.详细设计文档:这份文档详细描述了所有游戏机制和界面。这份文档通常有两个用途:让设计师记住他们想出的所有小细节,并帮助将这些想法传达给必须编写代码的工程师和需要让它们看起来漂亮的艺术家。由于这份文档很少被“局外人”看到,它通常很乱,只包含足够的细节来引发讨论,并防止重要的想法被遗忘。它通常是最厚的文档,很少更新。在项目进行到一半时,它通常会被完全抛弃——到那时,游戏本身已经包含了大多数重要细节,而其中没有的细节通常会通过电子邮件或简短的笔记等非正式方式进行交换。然而,在项目开始时,找到设计文档的正确形式非常重要。在大多数情况下,拥有许多详细描述游戏各个子系统的小文档比拥有一份巨型文档要好得多。设计师 Rich Marmura 说得好:“我对 GDD(游戏设计文档)的理念是,根据我合作的团队量身定制。虽然 GDD 是我整理想法的地方,但它也必须是团队成员获取信息和清晰度的地方。虽然 GDD 之间的共同核心可能保持一致,但大部分结构和风格会随着游戏而变化。正如没有两个团队或游戏是完全相同的,也没有两个 GDD 应该完全相同。”

  • 2. Detailed design document: This document is the one that describes all the game mechanics and interfaces in great detail. This document usually serves two purposes: so the designers remember all the little detailed ideas they came up with and help communicate those ideas to the engineers who have to code them and the artists who need to make them look nice. Since this document is seldom seen by “outsiders,” it is usually a terrible mess with just enough detail to spark discussion and keep important ideas from being forgotten. It is often the thickest of the documents and is seldom kept up to date. Halfway through the project, it is often abandoned entirely—by that point, the game itself contains most of the important details, and the ones not in there are often exchanged through informal means, such as e-mails or short pages of notes. At the beginning of a project, though, finding the right form for your design documents is important. In most cases, it is much better to have many small documents detailing the various subsystems of the game than one giant document. Designer Rich Marmura puts it well, “My philosophy on GDDs (Game Design Documents) is that I tailor them to the team I am working with. While the GDD is a place to organize my thoughts, it must also be a place where team members go for information and clarity. While a common core may remain consistent across GDDs, much of the structure and style change with the game. Just as no two teams or games are ever the same, no two GDDs should ever be the same.”

  • 3.故事概述:许多游戏都需要专业作家来为游戏创作对话和叙述。这些作家通常是合同工,而且通常远离团队的其他成员。游戏设计师经常发现有必要创建一份简短的文档,描述游戏中将发生的重要设置、角色和动作。作家们经常会对此做出回应,提出有趣的新想法,从而改变整个游戏设计。

  • 3. Story overview: Many games call for professional writers who will create dialog and narration for the game. These writers are often contracted and often far away from the rest of the team. The game designers often find it necessary to create a short document that describes the important settings, characters, and actions that will take place in the game. Frequently, the writers respond to this with interesting new ideas that change the whole game design.

工程

Engineering

  • 4.技术设计文档:通常,电子游戏有许多复杂的系统,这些系统与游戏机制无关,但与让内容出现在屏幕上、通过网络发送数据以及其他棘手的技术任务有关。通常,工程团队以外的人不会太关心这些细节,但如果工程团队不止一个人,那么将这些细节记录在文档中通常是有意义的,这样当其他人加入团队时,他们就可以了解整个事情应该如何运作。与详细设计文档一样,它很少在项目进行到一半以上时保持最新状态,但编写此文档对于构建必要的系统和进行编码通常是必不可少的。

  • 4. Technical design document: Often, a videogame has many complex systems that have nothing to do with game mechanics and everything to do with getting things to appear on the screen, sending data over networks, and other crunchy technical tasks. Usually, no one outside the engineering team cares much about these details, but if the engineering team is more than one person, it often makes sense to record these details in a document so that when others join the team, they can understand how the whole thing is supposed to work. Like the detailed design document, it is rare for this to stay up to date more than halfway through a project, but writing this document is often essential to getting the necessary systems architected and the coding underway.

  • 5.流程概述:电子游戏设计的大部分挑战性工作都来自于将艺术资产正确地整合到游戏中。如果艺术作品要在游戏中正确呈现,艺术家通常必须遵守一些特殊的“注意事项”。这份简短的文档通常由工程师专门为艺术团队生成,越简单越好。

  • 5. Pipeline overview: Much of the challenging work of engineering a videogame comes from properly integrating art assets into the game. There are often special “do’s and don’ts” the artists must adhere to, if the art is to appear properly in the game. This brief document is usually generated by the engineers explicitly for the art team, and the simpler it is, the better.

  • 6.系统限制:设计师和艺术家通常完全不知道他们所设计的系统上什么可以做,什么不可以做(或者他们假装知道)。对于某些游戏,工程师发现创建文档来明确某些不应跨越的限制很有用 - 屏幕上同时出现的多边形数量、每秒发送的更新消息数量、屏幕上同时出现的爆炸数量等。通常这些信息不是那么一成不变,但尝试建立它(并以书面形式记录下来)可以节省大量时间 - 并且它可以帮助促进有关突破这些限制的创造性解决方案的讨论。

  • 6. System limitations: Designers and artists are often completely unaware of what is and is not possible on the system they are designing for (or so they pretend). For some games, the engineers find it useful to create documents that make clear certain limits that should not be crossed—number of polygons on the screen at once, number of update messages sent per second, number of simultaneous explosions on screen at once, etc. Often this information is not so cut and dried, but trying to establish it (and get it in writing) can save a lot of time later—and it can help foster discussions about creative solutions to get past these limits.

艺术

Art

  • 7.艺术圣经:如果几位艺术家要合作创作一款游戏,以创造单一、一致的外观和感觉,他们必须有一些指导方针来帮助保持这种一致性。“艺术圣经”只是一份提供这些指导方针的文件。这些可能是角色表、环境示例、颜色使用示例、界面示例,或定义游戏中任何元素外观的任何其他内容。

  • 7. Art bible: If several artists are going to work together on a title to create a single, consistent look and feel, they must have some guidelines to help maintain this consistency. An “art bible” is simply a document that provides these guidelines. These might be character sheets, examples of environments, examples of color usage, examples of interface, or anything else that defines the look of any element in the game.

  • 8.概念艺术概述:团队中有许多人需要在游戏制作之前了解游戏的外观。这是概念艺术的工作。然而,艺术本身通常不能讲述故事——它往往在设计文档中最为有意义,因此艺术团队经常与设计团队合作,制作出一组图像,展示它们在游戏设计背景下的外观和感觉。这些早期图像最终会出现在各个地方——游戏设计概述,在详细设计文档中,有时甚至在技术文档中,以说明该技术力求实现的外观类型。

  • 8. Concept art overview: There are many people on the team that need to understand what the game is going to look like before it is built. This is the job of concept art. The art alone doesn’t usually tell the story, though—it often makes the most sense in a design document, so often the art team works with the design team to come up with a set of images that show how they will look and feel in the context of the game design. These early images end up everywhere—in the game design overview, in the detailed design document, and sometimes even in technical documents, to illustrate the type of look that the technology is striving to achieve.

生产

Production

  • 9.游戏预算:虽然我们都希望“一直开发游戏直到完成”,但游戏行业的经济现实很少允许我们这样做。通常,团队需要在完全理解他们正在构建的内容之前确定开发游戏的成本。这个成本通常是通过一份文件(通常是电子表格)得出的,该文件试图列出完成游戏需要做的所有工作,并估算出转换为美元所需的时间。制作人或项目经理不可能独自得出这些数字,因此他们通常会与团队的每个部分密切合作,以使估算尽可能准确。通常,这份文件是最先创建的,因为它用于帮助确保项目的资金。优秀的项目经理将在整个项目中不断改进这份文件,以确保项目不会超出已分配的预算。

  • 9. Game budget: While we would all like to just “work on the game until it is done,” the economic realities of the game business seldom allow this. Usually, the team is required to come up with a cost to develop the game before they completely understand what they are building. This cost is usually arrived at through a document, usually a spreadsheet, that attempts to list all the work that needs to be done to complete the game and complete with time estimates that translate into dollars. It is impossible for the producer or project manager to come up with these numbers on their own, so they generally work closely with every part of the team to make the estimates as accurate as possible. Often this document is one of the first created, since it is used to help secure the funding for the project. A good project manager will continue to evolve this document throughout the project to ensure that the project does not go over the budget it has been allocated.

  • 10.资产追踪器:不管是用简单的电子表格还是更正式的系统,您都需要追踪已创建的内容及其状态。这适用于代码、游戏级别、艺术资产、声音和音乐以及设计文档。资产追踪的​​一个非常重要的方面是审批:每项资产是否都有合适的人批准?

  • 10. Asset tracker: Somehow, be it with a simple spreadsheet or a more formal system, you need to keep track of what has been created and what state it is in. This goes for code, game levels, art assets, sound and music, and design documents. A very important aspect of asset tracking is approvals: have the right people approved each asset?

  • 11.项目进度表:在运行良好的项目中,此文档将是最频繁更新的文档。我们知道游戏设计和开发过程充满了惊喜和意外变化。尽管如此,某种规划还是必要的,理想情况下,规划至少每周可以更改一次。一份好的项目进度表文档列出了需要完成的所有任务、每项任务需要多长时间、每项任务必须在何时完成以及由谁来完成。希望这份文档能够考虑到这样一个事实:一个人一周的工作时间不应超过四十小时,以及某些任务只有在其他任务完成后才能开始。有时,此进度表保存在电子表格中,有时保存在更正式的项目管理软件中。对于中型或大型游戏来说,保持此文档的更新很容易成为一项全职工作。

  • 11. Project schedule: On a well-run project, this document will be the one most frequently updated. We know the process of game design and development is rife with surprises and unexpected changes. Nevertheless, some kind of planning is necessary, ideally planning that can change on a weekly basis at the least. A good project schedule document lists all the tasks that need to be accomplished, how long each will take, when each task must be completed, and who will do them. Hopefully, this document will take into account the fact that a single person shouldn’t do more than forty hours in a week and the fact that some tasks can’t be started until others are completed. Sometimes this schedule is kept on a spreadsheet and other times on more formal project management software. Keeping this document up to date can easily be a full-time job on a medium-sized or larger game.

写作

Writing

  • 12.故事圣经:虽然人们可能认为游戏的故事可能完全由项目的作者(如果有的话)决定,但通常情况下,项目中的每个人都会为故事做出有意义的改变。引擎程序员可能会意识到某个故事元素的技术挑战太大,他们可能会提出故事修改建议。艺术家可能会对故事的全新部分有一个视觉创意,这是作者从未想象过的。游戏设计师可能会对需要故事修改的游戏玩法概念有一些想法。一个故事圣经规定了这个故事世界中什么可能、什么不可能,这让团队中的每个人都能更轻松地贡献故事创意,最终打造出一个更强大的故事世界,将艺术、技术和游戏玩法完美地融合在一起。

  • 12. Story bible: While one might think that the story of the game might be determined entirely by the writers (if any) on the project, it is often the case that everyone on the project contributes meaningful changes to the story. The engine programmers might realize that a certain story element is going to be too much of a technical challenge, and they might propose a story change. The artists might have a visual idea for a whole new part of the story that the writers never imagined. The game designers might have some ideas for gameplay concepts that require story changes. A story bible that lays down the law about what is and is not possible in this story world makes it much easier for everyone on the team to contribute story ideas, and ultimately this makes for a stronger story world that is well integrated with art, technology, and gameplay.

  • 13.脚本:如果游戏中的 NPC 要说话,他们的对话必须来自某个地方!此对话通常写在脚本文档中,该文档要么独立于详细设计文档,要么作为详细设计文档的附录。游戏设计师必须审查所有对话,因为对话很容易与游戏规则不一致。

  • 13. Script: If the NPCs in the game are going to talk, their dialog has to come from somewhere! This dialog is often written in a script document that is either separate from or an appendix to the detailed design document. It is crucial that the game designers review all of the dialog, since it is all too easy for a line of dialog to be inconsistent with a rule of gameplay.

  • 14.游戏教程和手册:电子游戏很复杂,玩家必须以某种方式学习如何玩游戏。游戏内教程、网页和印刷手册通常是这种情况。这些内容中的文字很重要——如果玩家无法理解你的游戏,他们怎么能享受它呢?你的游戏设计细节可能会在开发的最后一分钟继续变化,因此确保有人不断检查这些文字以确保其与游戏实施仍然准确无误是很重要的。

  • 14. Game tutorial and manual: Videogames are complex, and the players have to learn how to play them somehow. In-game tutorials, web pages, and printed manuals are how this usually happens. The text that goes into these is important—if players can’t understand your game, how can they enjoy it? The details of your game design will likely continue to change up until the last minute of development, so it is important to be sure someone is continually checking this text to make sure it is still accurate with the game implementation.

玩家

Players

  • 15.游戏攻略:开发人员并不是唯一编写游戏文档的人!如果玩家喜欢一款游戏,他们会自己编写文档并发布到网上。研究玩家对游戏的评论可以很好地详细了解玩家喜欢和不喜欢游戏的哪些方面,哪些部分太难,哪些部分太简单。当然,等到编写完玩家攻略后,再想修改游戏通常已经太晚了——但至少下次你会知道!

  • 15. Game walk-through: The developers aren’t the only ones who make documents about the game! If players like a game, they are going to write their own documents about it and post them online. Studying what your players write about your game can be a great way to find out, in detail, what players like and dislike about your game, which parts are too hard, and which are too easy. By the time a player walk-through is written, of course, it is often too late to change your game—but at least you’ll know for next time!

再次强调,这些文档不是神奇的模板——没有神奇的模板!每个游戏都是不同的,在记忆和沟通方面都有不同的需求,你必须自己去发现。

Again, these documents are not a magic template—there is no magic template! Each game is different and will have different needs in terms of both memory and communication that you will have to discover for yourself.

那么,我从哪里开始呢?

So, Where Do I Start?

你可以从简单开始,就像你开始设计游戏时一样。从一份文档开始,这份文档是你想在游戏中包含的想法的粗略列表。随着列表的增长,你会在脑海中浮现出关于设计的问题——这些问题至关重要!把它们写下来,这样你就不会忘记它们了!“设计”主要意味着回答这些问题,所以你不想丢失这些问题。每次你对一个问题的回答让你满意时,记下你做出这个决定的原因。渐渐地,你的想法、计划、问题和答案的列表会越来越长,并开始自然地分成几个部分。继续写下你需要记住的事情和你需要交流的事情。不知不觉中,你就有了一个设计文档——不是基于魔法模板的文档,而是一个围绕你独特游戏的独特设计有机成长的文档。

You start simply, just like you did when you started designing your game. Start with a document that is a rough bullet list of the ideas you want to include in your game. As the list grows, questions will arise in your mind about the design—these questions are crucial! Write them down so you don’t forget them! “Working on your design” will mostly mean answering these questions, so you don’t want to lose the questions. Each time you answer a question to your satisfaction, make a note of the decision and the reason why you made it. Gradually, your list of ideas, plans, questions, and answers will grow and start to fall naturally into sections. Keep writing down the things you need to remember and the things you need to communicate. Before you know it, you will have a design document—not one based on a magic template but one that grew organically around the unique design of your unique game.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 丹尼尔·库克(Daniel Cook ) 撰写的游戏设计日志。丹的《迷失花园》博客中的这篇精彩文章为解决陈旧设计文档的问题提供了绝佳的解决方案。

  • Game Design Logs by Daniel Cook. This excellent entry in Dan’s Lost Garden blog provides an excellent solution to the problem of stale design documents.

  • Stone Librande 的单页设计。Stone 在 2010 年游戏开发者大会上发表的这个演讲一夜之间改变了游戏行业。每个人都认为这是创建设计概述的最佳方法,因此一夜之间它成为了行业标准。演讲的幻灯片可以在这里找到: http://www.stonetronix.com/gdc-2010/

  • One Page Designs by Stone Librande. This talk changed the game industry overnight when Stone gave it at GDC 2010. It was so obvious to everyone that this was the best method to create design overviews that it became an industry standard overnight. Slides from the presentation can be found here: http://www.stonetronix.com/gdc-2010/.

第二十 八章

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

好的游戏是通过游戏测试创造的

Good Games Are Created through Playtesting



28.1

FIGURE

28.1

游戏测试

Playtesting



28.2

FIGURE

28.2

在开发游戏时,很容易幻想玩家的体验,想象它会有多棒。游戏测试是必不可少的,它可以起到警示作用,迫使你解决一直拖延的棘手问题。在我们深入讨论之前,我想先区分一下四种不同类型的测试(焦点小组、QA 测试、可用性测试和游戏测试):

It is easy, when developing a game, to fantasize about the player experience and to imagine how great it will be. Playtesting is necessary to serve as a wakeup call and force you to solve the ugly problems you’ve been putting off. Before we get too deep into this discussion, I want to draw the distinction between four different types of testing (focus groups, QA testing, usability testing, and playtesting):

  1. 焦点小组:这个术语经常让专业设计师感到畏缩。它指的是采访潜在玩家的喜好,通常是为了确定他们是否喜欢公司正在考虑的游戏创意。焦点小组在适当的环境下非常有用(特别是在决定明确功能的相对优先级时),但它的名声不好,因为它们通常运行不善,并被操纵来扼杀管理层害怕的创意。

  2. Focus groups: This is a term that often causes professional designers to wince. It refers to sessions where potential players are interviewed about their likes and dislikes, often in an attempt to determine whether they like a game idea that a company is considering. Focus groups can be quite useful in the right context (particularly when deciding the relative priority of well-defined features), but they have a bad name because they are so often poorly run and manipulated to kill ideas that management is afraid of.

  3. QA 测试:QA 是“质量保证”。这种测试与游戏的乐趣无关,只与查找错误有关。

  4. QA testing: QA is “quality assurance.” This testing has nothing to do with how enjoyable the game is and everything to do with looking for bugs.

  5. 可用性测试:这是为了确定您的界面和系统是否直观且易于使用。这两者都是游戏乐趣的必要条件,但还不够。当有人建议聘请可用性专家来让您的游戏更有趣时,请记住这一点。

  6. Usability testing: This is all about determining whether your interface and systems are intuitive and easy to use. Both of these are necessary for an enjoyable game, but they are not enough. Keep this in mind when someone suggests bringing in a usability expert to make your game more fun.

  7. 游戏测试:与前三项不同,游戏测试就是让人们来玩你的游戏,看看它是否能带来预期的体验。设计了游戏测试。虽然其他三种类型的测试也很有用且很重要,但在本章中,我们将只关注设计师最关心的测试类型:游戏测试。

  8. Playtesting: Separate from the previous three, playtesting is all about getting people to come play your game to see if it engenders the experience for which it was designed. And while the other three types of testing are useful and important, in this chapter, we will focus only on the type of testing designers care about the most: playtesting.

我的可怕秘密

My Terrible Secret

我现在要承认一件让我非常尴尬的事情。多年来,我一直试图假装事实并非如此,但这是无法回避的。我不喜欢谈论这件事,因为这会让我成为一个伪君子,并让我作为游戏设计师的资格受到严重质疑。

I’m going to admit something now that is profoundly embarrassing. For years, I have tried to pretend that it isn’t the case, but there is no getting around it. I don’t like talking about it, because it makes me a hypocrite and calls my qualifications as a game designer into serious question.

然而,我写这本书的目的是帮助阐明游戏设计的真实面目,而不是某种理想版的游戏设计。所以,就这样吧。请不要太苛刻地评判我。

However, my goal with this book is to help lay out how game design really is, not some idyllic dream version of how it should be. So, here it goes. Please try not to judge me too harshly.

我讨厌游戏测试。

I hate playtesting.

游戏测试是否会在还有时间修复问题之前尽早发现问题?是的。游戏测试是否会增强团队的信心,让他们相信自己在为合适的受众制作合适的游戏?是的。游戏测试对于制作一款好游戏来说是必不可少的吗?是的。游戏测试是否会让我感到恐惧,甚至无法正常思考?是的,是的,是的!

Does playtesting find problems early, while there is still time to fix them? Yes. Does playtesting build the team’s confidence that they are making the right game for the right audience? Yes. Is playtesting essential to making a good game? Yes. Does playtesting fill me with a terror so intense that I can’t even think straight? Yes, yes, yes!

这真是太丢脸了。我知道游戏测试对我的游戏有好处,不仅好,而且很必要。但当真正进行游戏测试时,我会找各种借口来避免它。首先,我会推迟组织游戏测试。当它最终组织起来时,我会找借口说我不能去那里。当我真正在那里时,我会找理由不直接观察它,因为附近可能有其他东西分散了注意力。我很清楚这些倾向,我会拼命与之抗争,但我仍然害怕游戏测试。

It’s completely humiliating. I know that playtesting is good for my game, not just good, but necessary. But when it comes to actually doing the playtesting, I find every excuse possible to avoid it. First, I delay getting the playtesting organized. When it eventually gets organized, I make excuses why I can’t be there. When I actually am there, I find reasons not to observe it directly, getting distracted with anything else that might be nearby. I’m well aware of these tendencies, and I fight them tooth and nail, but still, my fear of playtesting remains.

为什么?我为什么这么害怕?很简单。我害怕人们不喜欢我的游戏。我知道我应该超越这一点。但我没有。当你制作一款游戏时,你会尽力投入一切:心血、灵魂、梦想、血汗和泪水。你努力制作的游戏会成为你自己的一小部分。让人们参与其中然后拒绝它,嗯,这很伤人。非常伤人。别自欺欺人了——这是会发生的。

Why? What am I so afraid of? It’s simple. I’m afraid that people won’t like my game. I should be above that, I know. But I’m not. When you make a game, you try to put everything you can into it: heart, soul, dreams, blood, sweat, and tears. A game you work hard on becomes a little piece of yourself. To have people engage with that and then reject it, well, it hurts. A lot. And don’t kid yourself—it is going to happen.

作为一名游戏设计师,最痛苦的事情之一可能是有人讨厌你的作品。游戏测试就像是一张刻着以下内容的邀请函:

Having people hate your work is probably one of the most painful parts of being a game designer. And playtesting is like an engraved invitation that reads:

诚挚邀请您

告诉我为什么我很差劲,

带上朋友一起来 — 提供茶点

You are cordially invited

to tell me why I suck

Bring a friend — Refreshments Served

游戏测试真的会让人这么不舒服吗?确实如此。游戏测试的全部意义在于让你明白,你做出的一些决定是完全你所习惯的习惯是完全错误的。你需要尽快发现这些事情,趁还有时间去做点什么。

Does playtesting have to be so uncomfortable? It does. The whole point of playtesting is to make clear to you that some of the decisions you were completely comfortable with are completely wrong. You need to find these things out as soon as possible, while there is still time to do something about them.

也许游戏测试对你来说是一件自然而然的事情。也许你不怕别人嘲笑你的作品。如果是这样,恭喜你!在游戏测试过程中,你的客观观点将对你大有裨益。但如果你像我一样害怕和厌恶这些环节,那么只有一件事要做:克服它。人们要么喜欢你的游戏,要么不喜欢。如果他们喜欢,那很好。如果他们不喜欢,也很好!你有机会问他们为什么不喜欢,这样你就可以解决这个问题。放下你的恐惧,接受游戏测试:一个让你的游戏变得更好的绝佳机会。

Maybe playtesting comes naturally to you. Maybe you have no fear of people ridiculing your work. If so, congratulations! Your objective viewpoint will be a great boon to you during playtesting sessions. But if you fear and loathe these sessions, like I do, there is only one thing to do: get over it. People are either going to like your game or they aren’t. If they do, great. If they don’t, also great! You have a chance to ask them why they don’t like it, so you can fix it. Let go of your fears and embrace playtesting for what it is: a wonderful opportunity to make your game better.

每次游戏测试都由六个关键问题定义:为什么、谁、何时、何地、什么和如何?

Every playtest is defined by six key questions: Why, who, when, where, what, and how?

游戏测试第一个问题:为什么?

Playtest Question the First: Why?

你还记得在第 8 章迭代中,我们讨论过每个原型是如何设计来回答一个问题的吗?游戏测试是一种原型——不是游戏的原型,而是游戏体验的原型(这才是我们最关心的!)。如果你在进行游戏测试时没有明确目标,你很有可能会浪费时间。组织游戏测试时提出的问题越具体,你得到的收获就越多。

Do you remember how, in Chapter 8: Iteration, we discussed how every prototype is designed to answer a question? A playtest is a kind of prototype—not a prototype of the game, but a prototype of the game experience (which is what we care about the most!). If you don’t enter into your playtest with specific goals in mind, you stand a good chance of wasting your time. The more specific the questions you have when you organize the playtest, the more you will get out of it.

你可能希望你的游戏测试能回答数百万个问题。最明显的一个问题——“我的游戏有趣吗?”——是不够的。通常,你希望你的问题尽可能具体。以下是一些示例——有些是一般性的,有些是具体的:

There are millions of questions you might want your playtest to answer. The most obvious one—“Is my game fun?”—is not enough. Generally, you want your questions to be as specific as possible. The examples are as follows—some general, some specific:

  • 男人和女人玩我的游戏有什么不同吗?

  • Do men and women play my game differently?

  • 孩子们比成年人更喜欢我的游戏吗?

  • Do kids like my game better than adults?

  • 玩家明白怎么玩吗?

  • Do players understand how to play?

  • 玩家还想玩第二次吗?第三次?第二十次?为什么?

  • Do players want to play a second time? A third time? A twentieth time? Why?

  • 玩家觉得游戏公平吗?

  • Do players feel the game is fair?

  • 玩家会感到无聊吗?

  • Are players ever bored?

  • 玩家们是否感到困惑?

  • Are players ever confused?

  • 玩家是否曾感到沮丧?

  • Are players ever frustrated?

  • 是否存在显性策略或漏洞?

  • Are there any dominant strategies or loopholes?

  • 游戏是否存在隐藏的 Bug?

  • Does the game have hidden bugs?

  • 玩家自己找到了什么策略?

  • What strategies do players find on their own?

  • 游戏中哪些部分最有趣?

  • Which parts of the game are the most fun?

  • 游戏中哪些部分最无趣?

  • Which parts of the game are the least fun?

  • 跳跃时应该使用“A”键还是“B”键?

  • Should the “A” button or “B” button be used for jumping?

  • 第三级是不是太长了?

  • Is level three too long?

  • 芦笋拼图是不是太难了?

  • Is the asparagus puzzle too hard?

这些只是一些让你思考的想法。我经常发现,使用本书中的镜头是提出好的游戏测试问题的好方法。

These are just a few ideas to get you thinking. I often find that using the lenses throughout this book is a great way to come up with good playtesting questions.

准备一份你希望游戏测试回答的问题清单是规划游戏测试的第一步,因为在你确定“为什么”之前,比如“我们为什么要进行这个游戏测试?”,无法回答谁、在哪里、做什么和怎么做的问题。

Preparing a list of the questions you would like the playtest to answer is a great first step to planning a playtest, because until you have determined the “why,” as in “why are we having this playtest?” there is no way to answer the who, where, what, and how.

游戏测试第二个问题:谁?

Playtest Question the Second: Who?

一旦你知道了为什么要进行游戏测试,你就可以决定测试对象了。而选择测试对象完全取决于你想了解什么。最有可能的是,你想选择目标人群。但即便如此,你还是有选择的。以下是一些常见的选择:

Once you know why you are having a playtest, you can decide who you should be testing. And who you pick is entirely determined by what you would like to learn. Most likely, you want to pick people who are in your target demographic. But even then, there are choices. Here are some common ones:

  1. 开发人员:第一个有机会尝试您的游戏的人是开发人员,因此我首先列出他们。

    • 优点:开发人员就在那儿!他们可以长时间玩游戏,并提供大量有意义、深思熟虑的反馈。此外,您不必担心他们会填写保密协议 (NDA),因为他们已经知道有关游戏的所有机密信息。

    • 缺点:开发人员与游戏的距离太近——比任何真正的玩家都近——这会扭曲他们对游戏的看法。一些“设计专家”会告诉你,与游戏开发人员一起进行游戏测试很危险,你不应该这样做。然而,这种极端立场意味着你可能会错过一些有价值的见解。最好与开发人员一起进行游戏测试,但对他们说的话要谨慎对待。

  2. Developers: The first people who will get a chance to try your game are the developers, so I’m listing them first.

    • Pros: The developers are right there! They can play the game a lot, and for a long time, and give lots of meaningful, thoughtful feedback. Also, you don’t need to worry about them filling out nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), since they already know all the confidential information about the game.

    • Cons: The developers are too close to the game—closer than any real player ever will be—and this will distort their opinions about the game. Some “design experts” will tell you that it is dangerous to playtest with people who work on the game and that you shouldn’t do it. This extreme position means, though, that you could miss out on some valuable insights. It is better to playtest the developers but take what they say with a grain of salt.

  3. 朋友:下一个尝试该游戏的人很可能是开发者的朋友和家人。

    • 优点:朋友和家人非常乐意与您交谈。如果他们在游戏测试结束后想到了一个好主意,您可能仍会听到。

    • 缺点:你的朋友和家人不想伤害你的感情——毕竟,他们必须经常和你打交道。这可能会导致他们在不喜欢某件事时歪曲事实。此外,由于他们已经喜欢你,他们会倾向于喜欢这个游戏——他们会努力去喜欢它,而这在现实世界中不会发生。

  4. Friends: The next people to try the game will most likely be friends and families of the developers.

    • Pros: Friends and families are highly available and comfortable talking to you. If they think of a good idea after the playtest is over, you’ll probably still get to hear it.

    • Cons: Your friends and family don’t want to hurt your feelings—after all, they have to deal with you on a regular basis. This might cause them to bend the truth when they don’t like something. Also, since they like you already, they are going to be predisposed to like the game—they will be trying to like it, which isn’t what will happen in the real world.

  5. 专家级玩家:每个游戏类型都有其“专家”——玩过您正在制作的各种游戏的铁杆玩家。这些人喜欢参与测试尚未完成的游戏,因为这会提升他们的“专家”资格!

    • 优点:这些专业玩家玩过很多(如果不是全部的话)与你正在制作的游戏类似的游戏,他们可以使用技术术语和具体示例,向你详细介绍你的游戏与类似游戏的比较情况。

    • 缺点:就像只有一小部分的美食爱好者是美食家一样,只有一小部分的游戏爱好者是“游戏迷”。专业玩家通常比普通玩家更厌倦游戏,需要更复杂、更困难的游戏挑战。许多游戏都因为过度调整以迎合小众硬核爱好者的精英品味而被毁了。《模拟人生在线》原本有望大获成功,但最终却以惨败告终。原因之一似乎是它过于迎合最硬核的玩家,他们对创造内容比体验内容更感兴趣。

  6. Expert gamers: Every genre has its “experts”—hardcore players who have played every variety of the type of game you are making. These individuals love coming to playtest games still in progress, because it gives their “expert” credentials a boost!

    • Pros: Having played many, if not all, of the games that are similar to the one you are making, these expert gamers can give you a detailed account, using technical terminology and specific examples, of how your game compares to games that are like it.

    • Cons: Just as only a small percentage of the eating public are gourmands, only a small percentage of the gaming public are, uh, “ludophiles.” Expert gamers are often more jaded and demand more complex and difficult gameplay challenges than the average gamer. Many a game has been spoiled by overtuning it for the elite tastes of a niche audience of hardcore enthusiasts. The Sims Online, which was expected to be a huge success, ended up as a crashing failure. One reason seems to have been that it was overtuned for the most hardcore players, who were more excited about creating content than experiencing it.

  7. 纸巾测试者:理想的​​测试条件通常包括从未见过你的游戏的人。业内人士喜欢称他们为“新鲜人”或“纸巾测试者”(指的是他们就像 Kleenex 纸巾一样,只能使用一次)。

    • 优点:从未见过您游戏的人会用全新的眼光看待您的游戏,并会注意到您已经习惯的东西。对于试图确定可用性问题、沟通问题或“初始吸引力”问题的测试,这些测试人员可能非常有价值。

    • 缺点:游戏通常会在多个环节中多次进行。如果你只用“纸巾测试者”来测试你的游戏,那么你可能会制作一款首次吸引人但玩过多次后就会感到无聊的游戏。

  8. Tissue testers: Ideal testing conditions often include people who have never seen your game before. The industry likes to call them “fresh meat” or “tissue testers” (a reference to the fact that, like a Kleenex tissue, they can only be used once).

    • Pros: People who have never seen your game before see it with fresh eyes and will notice the things that you have gotten used to. For testing that tries to determine usability questions, communication questions, or questions of “initial appeal,” these testers can be very valuable.

    • Cons: Games are generally played multiple times, over many sessions. If you only test your game with “tissue testers,” you run the risk of making a game that has a strong first-time appeal but gets boring after multiple plays.

再次强调,测试人员的选择完全取决于你想要了解什么。将测试人员与你想要回答的问题相匹配是获得有意义结果的唯一方法。几乎每个游戏在设计过程中都会与上述测试人员进行某种组合测试——关键是在正确的时间安排正确的测试人员,以尽可能全面地回答大多数问题。

Again, who you test with will depend entirely on what you are trying to learn. Matching the testers to the questions you are trying to answer is the only way to get meaningful results. Nearly every game will test with some combination of the aforementioned testers sometime during the design process—the key is having the right testers at the right times to answer the most questions as thoroughly as possible.

游戏测试问题第三个:什么时候?

Playtest Question the Third: When?

找借口不进行游戏测试很容易……主要借口是“游戏还没有准备好。”但你越早进行游戏测试,你就能越早知道你的游戏是否走在正确的轨道上。无论游戏处于哪个阶段,你都可以进行游戏测试:

It is easy to come up with excuses not to playtest… and the main excuse is, “the game isn’t ready yet.” But the sooner you playtest, the sooner you will know whether your game is on the right track. You can playtest your game no matter what stage it’s at:

构思前:召集一个焦点小组,由你想为之制作游戏的人群组成。“你喜欢什么样的游戏?你想看到什么样的游戏?”

Pre-Idea: Get a focus group together of the kind of people you’d like to make a game for. “What kind of games do you like? What kind of games would you like to see?”

最初的概念:“我们想制作一款像这样的游戏......您觉得怎么样?”

Initial Concept: “We’re thinking we might make a game that works like this… what do you think?”

纸质原型:正如我们在第 8 章迭代中讨论的那样,纸质原型是测试新游戏概念的一种非常有效的方法。但不要把纸质游戏的所有乐趣都留给开发人员——邀请游戏测试者来看看他们是否喜欢你刚刚开始玩的游戏。

Paper Prototype: As we discussed in Chapter 8: Iteration, paper prototyping can be a very efficient way to test out a new game concept. But don’t leave all the paper game fun for the developers—invite playtesters in to see how they like your just-barely-playable game.

白盒原型:太棒了!你编写了游戏代码,但实际上还没有任何艺术作品。没关系!向玩家提供警告,然后让他们玩。无论如何,人们对较丑的游戏给出的反馈更诚实!

Whitebox Prototype: Great! You coded up your game, but it doesn’t really have any art in it yet. That’s okay! Give players the caveats, and then get them playing it. People give more honest feedback about uglier games anyway!

工作原型:太棒了!您已经拥有了一款功能齐全的游戏!请尽可能在流程后期进行游戏测试。

Working Prototype: Awesome! You have something like a functional game! Keep the playtesting going as late into the process as you can.

已完成、已发行的游戏:游戏已完成……现在进行游戏测试太晚了,对吧?错!如今一切都围绕着“游戏即服务”展开——玩家甚至在游戏发行很久之后仍期待修复和新功能。这样一来,游戏的发行就像是最大的游戏测试!

Finished, Shipped Game: The game is done… too late to playtest it now, right? Wrong! Nowadays it’s all about “Games as a Service”—players expect fixes and new features even long after your game has shipped. In that way, shipping your game is like the biggest playtest of all!

希望您明白,您可以在开发过程中的任何时候测试您的游戏。但是……您实际应该多久进行一次游戏测试?游戏设计师和游戏测试专家肖恩·巴顿 (Shawn Patton) 对这个问题给出了一个简单的答案:

Hopefully you are getting the message that you can playtest your game at any time during the development process. But… how often should you realistically have a playtest? Game designer and playtesting wizard Shawn Patton has a simple answer to that question:

乌巴利

WUBALEW

当然,WUBALEW 代表“有用时,但至少每周”的意思。这听起来可能很多,但养成每周测试游戏的习惯可以确保你永远不会走得太远而得不到关于游戏的真实反馈。定期进行测试可以让它成为常规。一旦你每周进行游戏测试一段时间,你就会想知道以前没有它你是怎么过的。

And of course, WUBALEW stands for When Useful, But At Least Every Week. That might sound like a lot, but making it your habit to playtest your game weekly ensures that you’ll never go too far without getting real feedback about your game. And keeping it on a regular schedule makes it routine. Once you’ve been doing weekly playtesting for a while, you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it.

游戏测试问题第四个:在哪里?

Playtest Question the Fourth: Where?

就像游戏场地(参见第 3 章场地)一样,游戏测试场地也很重要。以下是一些不同的选择:

Just as much depends on the venue of your game (see Chapter 3: Venue), much depends on the venue of your playtest. Here are some different options:

  1. 在你的工作室(或者无论你如何称呼你实际制作游戏的地方)

    • 优点:开发人员都在那儿。您也在那儿。游戏就在那儿!因此,在您的工作室进行测试对您来说非常方便。此外,它还让团队中的每个人都有机会观察真人玩游戏。

    • 缺点:你邀请的游戏测试员可能感觉不太舒服。他们会处于陌生的环境中,除非他们有某种私人房间,否则他们可能会害怕在其他人工作时玩乐。如果你在工作室举办游戏测试,你应该尽最大努力让测试尽可能舒适。你最不希望看到的是游戏测试员害怕发出噪音、玩得开心、说出自己的想法。让测试员带朋友来会有所帮助。

  2. In your studio (or whatever you call the place you actually make the games)

    • Pros: The developers are all there. You are there. The game is there! So, testing in your studio can be superconvenient for you. Also, it gives everyone on the team a chance to observe the game being played by real people.

    • Cons: The playtesters you bring in might not feel completely comfortable. They will be in strange surroundings, and unless they have some kind of private room, they are likely to be afraid to have fun while others are working. If you host a playtest in your studio, you should go out of your way to make it as comfortable as possible. The last thing you want is playtesters who are afraid to make noise, have fun, and speak their minds. Asking the testers to bring friends helps.

  3. 在游戏测试实验室中:一些(尽管实际上数量很少)大型游戏公司有专门的游戏测试实验室。此外,一些第三方公司会在专门设计的实验室中为您测试游戏。

    • 优点:实验室专为游戏测试而设计!它可能拥有您所希望的一切:单向镜、游戏测试员身上的摄像头、游戏测试专家(可提出正确的问题并做详细笔记),甚至可能还有一组经过精心挑选的合适测试员!

    • 缺点:这种东西通常很贵。但如果你能负担得起,这笔投资还是值得的。

  4. In a playtesting lab: Some (though, actually, surprisingly few) large game companies have special labs set aside for playtesting. Also, some third-party companies will playtest your game for you in special labs designed for the purpose.

    • Pros: The lab is designed for playtesting! It probably has all the things you could wish for: one-way mirrors, cameras on the playtesters, playtesting experts to ask the right questions and take detailed notes, and maybe even a carefully selected group of the right testers!

    • Cons: This kind of thing is usually very expensive. But if you can afford it, it may well be worth the investment.

  5. 在某些公共场所:可能是购物中心、大学校园活动、PAX 或 Indiecade 等游戏节或街角的桌子。

    • 优点:通常花费不多,而且如果找到合适的场地,您将有机会获得许多测试者。当 Schell Games 需要测试其Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood游戏时,我们与匹兹堡儿童博物馆达成协议,定期在博物馆进行测试,这为我们提供了大量 3-5 岁儿童及其父母——这正是我们所需要的。

    • 缺点:您可能很难找到“合适的”测试人员,也就是您人口统计中的测试人员。此外,如果场地内还有其他活动,测试人员可能会分心,无法全神贯注于您。

  6. At some public venue: Could be a shopping mall, an event on a college campus, a games fest like PAX or Indiecade, or a table on a street corner.

    • Pros: It usually doesn’t cost much, and you will get a chance to get many testers, if you find the right venue. When Schell Games needed to test its Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood games, we worked out an arrangement with the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum to test periodically right in the museum, which provided an endless supply of 3–5-year-old children and their parents—precisely what we needed.

    • Cons: You may have a hard time finding the “right” testers, that is, the ones in your demographic. Also, if there are other things going on in this venue, testers may be distracted, not giving you their full attention.

  7. 在游戏测试员的家中:人们购买你的游戏后,他们会在家里玩 - 为什么现在不让他们在家里玩呢?

    • 优点:您有机会在真实条件下看到您的游戏在自然环境中运行。您的测试人员可能会邀请他们的朋友过来,您有机会通过您的游戏看到真实的社交互动。

    • 缺点:你的游戏测试可能会受到一定限制。可能只有一两位设计师可以到场观察,而且在特定会话期间,你可能只能与少数人进行测试。你可能还需要携带特殊硬件,或者至少花时间配置机器来运行你的原型软件。

  8. At the playtester’s home: After people buy your game, they are going to play it in their homes—why not let them play it there now?

    • Pros: You have a good chance of seeing your game played in its natural habitat, under real conditions. Your testers are likely to have their friends over, and you stand a chance of seeing real social interaction through your game.

    • Cons: Your playtest might be kind of limited. Probably only one or two designers can be there to observe, and you may only be able to test with a small number of people during a given session. You may also need to lug special hardware with you or at least spend time configuring machines to run your prototype software.

  9. 在线:为什么要将您的游戏测试限制在物理宇宙的范围内?

    • 优点:许多人将能够在具有多种不同配置的机器上测试您的游戏。如果您需要回答的问题涉及对您的游戏进行压力测试或了解大型多人游戏,这可能是您的最佳选择。

    • 缺点:游戏测试的数量是以牺牲游戏测试的质量为代价的。虽然可能有很多人在玩游戏,但当你不在同一个房间时,你无法获得相同程度的洞察力。此外,如果你想要保密你的游戏,当你提供下载时,这可能很难做到。此外,第一印象很重要,所以如果你要把未完成的版本放到网上,你需要限制你的玩家群。幸运的是,一些在线场所(如 Steam)正在创建安全的空间来放置游戏的测试版,以帮助控制玩家的期望。

  10. Online: Why restrict your playtesting to the confines of the physical universe?

    • Pros: Lots of people will be able to test your game on machines with many different configurations. If the questions you need to answer involve stress testing your game or learning about massively multiplayer play, this may be your best option.

    • Cons: Quantity of playtesting comes at the price of quality of playtesting. Though many people may be playing, you won’t get the same level of insight when you aren’t in the same room with the testers. Also, if you are trying to keep your game a secret, this may be hard to do when you make it available for download. Also, first impressions are important, so you need to restrict your player base if you are going to put an unfinished version online. Fortunately, some online venues (such as Steam) are creating safe spaces to put beta versions of your game, to help control player expectations.

你选择测试的具体地点完全取决于你的测试试图回答的问题。选择测试地点时,要考虑重要的“为什么?”问题。通常,最简单的想法是最好的——想想设计师 Curt Bererton 的这个故事:

Where exactly you choose to test depends completely on the questions your test is trying to answer. Choose your test location with your important “why?” questions in mind. Often, the simplest ideas are best—consider this story from designer Curt Bererton:

我们在一款 Alpha 测试版(一款 Facebook 游戏)中做了一件我认为非常有效的事,那就是在游戏下方放置一个约 2-3 行高文本的文本框。文本框中只写着“告诉我们如何让我们的游戏变得更好”,你可以在每次会话中发送一条消息,之后文本框就会消失。电子邮件将发送到邮件列表,团队中的任何人都可以注册该列表,以查看玩家在其中输入的内容。

这个简单的文本字段在 alpha 和 beta 阶段表现得非常好,我们甚至将其保留在可调整的小部分玩家(以及所有付费用户)的生产中,这样我们每天可以收到大约 30 条消息,我们可以随时浏览。您可能会认为您会收到更多人骂脏话之类的消息,但几乎所有消息都是非常高质量的反馈。我们发现了大量错误、用户体验问题,以及一些很棒的想法。每当我们推出新版本时,我们都会特别仔细地查看。顺便说一句,如果您发送一些玩家状态摘要数据(他们在教程或游戏进程中的位置)以及平台规格(版本、内存等),它除了让您随时了解社区的动态之外,还有助于查找错误。

One thing that we did that I found super effective in one of our alphas (for a Facebook game) was to put a text box about 2–3 lines of text in height below the game. All the text box said was “tell us how to make our game better,” and you could send one message per session after which the box would go away. Emails would go to a mailing list to which anyone on the team could sign up to see what players were putting in there.

This simple text field worked remarkably well during alpha and beta, and we even kept it in production for an adjustable small percentage of players (and all paying users) such that we’d get around 30 messages per day, which we could browse when we wished. You’d think you would get a lot more people swearing or something, but pretty much everything was very high quality feedback. We found a ton of bugs, user experience issues, as well as just great ideas. We would look especially closely whenever we did a push of a new version. As a side note, if you send some summary player state data along (where they are in the tutorial or game progression) along with platform specs (version, memory etc.) it helps with bug hunting in addition to keeping your finger on the pulse of your community.

游戏测试问题第五个:什么?

Playtest Question the Fifth: What?

我说的“什么?”是指“你在游戏测试中会寻找什么?”要寻找的东西有两种。

By “What?” I mean “What will you look for in your playtest?” There are two types of things to look for.

第一个是什么:你知道你正在寻找的东西

The First What: Things You Know You Are Looking For

这些来自你“为什么?”列表中的问题。希望你设计你的游戏测试时能够寻找这些问题的答案(这就是你列出它们的原因!)。在计划测试时,确保你有办法获得某种回答列表中每个问题。如果游戏中的某些部分与这些问题无关,请考虑制作一个跳过这些部分的特殊游戏版本以节省时间。如果问题无法通过一次测试全部回答,请考虑制作几个小测试,以涵盖您需要了解的内容。

These come from the questions in your “why?” list. Hopefully, you are going to design your playtest so that you can look for answers to these questions (that’s why you listed them!). As you plan your test, make sure that you have a way to get some kind of answer to every question on your list. If there are parts of your game that aren’t relevant to these questions, consider making a special version of the game that skips these parts to save time. If the questions can’t all be answered by a single test, consider making several minitests that will cover the span of things you need to find out.

第二个“什么”:你不知道自己在寻找的东西

The Second What: Things You Don’t Know You Are Looking For

任何人都能找到他们知道自己在寻找的东西——但只有真正善于观察的设计师,学会了深入倾听玩家的意见,才能找到他们不知道自己在寻找的东西。关键是要时刻留意惊喜。要想在游戏测试中感到惊喜,你必须已经知道会发生什么:玩家会以某种方式攻击第二级,他们会在第三级开始时感到兴奋,等等。每当发生任何不寻常的事情时,无论是好是坏,都要做好准备,并找到理解它的方法。当你预期相反时,女孩是否比男孩更喜欢你的游戏?当你认为你的反派很可怕时,他是否会让人们发笑?玩家是否对你认为不重要的事情感兴趣?他们是否在争论你从未考虑过的策略?找出原因!即使你没有测试这些东西,也要利用这个机会了解你以为已经了解的一切的真相。理解这些惊喜所带来的洞察力是游戏测试树上长出的最甜蜜的果实。

Anyone can find things they know they are looking for—but only a truly observant designer, who has learned to listen deeply to players, can find the things they don’t know they are looking for. The key is to keep your eyes open for surprises. To be surprised at a playtest, you must already have ideas about what will happen: Players will attack level two a certain way, they will get excited at the start of level three, etc. Whenever anything out of the ordinary happens, good or bad, be ready to jump on it, and find a way to understand it. Do girls like your game more than boys, when you expected the opposite? Does your villain make people laugh when you thought he would be scary? Are players intrigued by something you thought was unimportant? Are they debating strategies you never considered? Find out why! Even if you weren’t testing for these things, take advantage of this opportunity to learn the truth about everything you thought you already understood. The insight that comes from understanding these surprises is the sweetest fruit that grows on the playtesting tree.

游戏测试问题第六个:怎么样?

Playtest Question the Sixth: How?

所以你已经想清楚了为什么要进行游戏测试、观察对象、测试地点,甚至要寻找什么。这些都是很好的准备工作,但只有你决定如何进行测试,一切才算开始。

So you’ve figured out why you want to have a playtest, who you will observe, where you will hold it, and even what you are going to look for. Those are great preliminaries, but the rubber doesn’t meet the road until you decide how you are going to go about it.

你应该在那儿吗?

Should You Even Be There?

有一派观点认为,让游戏开发者在场测试游戏是危险的。危险在于,他们对游戏的情感投入会导致他们鼓励玩家忽视缺陷,并用内部人士的观点“感染”玩家。这种危险是真实存在的。如果你在游戏测试期间不能保持客观,并适当约束自己的行为,让游戏测试者保持“纯洁”,那么你绝对不应该在场。如果是这样,那真是太可惜了,因为亲自参加游戏测试比仅仅阅读调查数据或观看录制的视频能学到更多东西。所以,尽管一些设计理论家可能不同意,但我的建议是找到方法来抑制这些腐蚀性的冲动,这样你就可以亲自在场了。

There is a school of thought that believes it is dangerous to have the developers of a game present when it is tested. The danger is that their emotional investment in the game will cause them to encourage the players to overlook flaws and “infect” the players with an insider’s viewpoint. And this danger is very real. If you cannot stay objective during the playtest and properly police your behavior so that playtesters can remain “pure,” you definitely should not be there. If that is the case, it is a shame, because there is so much more you will learn by being present in person at a playtest than you can get from just reading survey data or watching recorded videos. So, though some design theorists might disagree, my advice is to find ways to restrain these corrupting impulses so you can be there in person.

您首先要告诉他们什么?

What Do You Tell Them Up Front?

对于某些测试,你根本不会告诉玩家任何信息——你会让游戏自己说话,特别是如果你想看看他们是否能自己弄清楚的时候。但对于大多数游戏测试,你需要告诉玩家一些事情来让他们开始。这样做时要格外小心——游戏开始前说错几句话可能会破坏整个测试。例如,如果你告诉玩家他们的目标是打败邪恶的 Chronos,一些玩家可能会立即开始寻找他,这样一来,他们就会错过如果你不这么说的话就会发现的重要细节。因此,你应该仔细记下你一开始对测试人员说的话,以防产生意想不到的后果。提前写下来是个好主意,这样你就可以确保你以同样的方式让所有测试人员做好准备。

For some tests, you won’t tell the players anything at all—you’ll let the game speak for itself, particularly if you want to see if they can figure it out by themselves. But for the majority of playtests, you will need to tell players something to get them started. Use extreme caution when you do so—a few misplaced words right before play begins can spoil the entire test. If, for example, you tell players that their goal is to defeat the evil Chronos, some players might start looking for him right away and, in doing so, miss out on important details they would have found if you hadn’t said that. For this reason, you should take careful note of what you say to testers at the beginning, in case it has unexpected consequences. It can be a good idea to write it down ahead of time, so you can be sure you have prepped all the testers the same way.

当然,在多次测试的过程中,你可能会发现需要修改你的介绍性演讲来澄清某些事情。而这正是游戏测试的一大附带好处。当你按顺序进行多次游戏测试时,你会发现自己逐渐调整了给玩家的指示,在这里删减一个词,在那里添加一个短语,直到你的演讲非常清晰、非常有效。记下来!这个演讲可以成为你的游戏内教程的基础。许多游戏教程都很糟糕——用这种方法创建的教程可能会给人一种优秀的感觉。拥有一个真正让玩家感到受欢迎和关心的游戏内教程是给你的游戏留下一个很好的第一印象。

Of course, you may find, over the course of several tests, a need to change your introductory speech to clarify certain things. And here is one of the great side benefits of playtesting. When you run multiple playtest sessions in sequence, you will find yourself gradually tuning the instructions you give to the players, trimming a word here, and adding a phrase there, until you have a speech that is very clear and very efficient. Write this down! This speech can become the foundation of your in-game tutorial. Many game tutorials are terrible—the ones created by this method are likely to have an aura of excellence about them. Having an in-game tutorial that really makes players feel welcome and cared for is a great first impression for your game to make.

你看哪儿?

Where Do You Look?

大多数参加游戏测试的人都会看玩家看的地方。如果是电子游戏,那就意味着看屏幕。这很有道理,因为这样你就能看到玩家看到的东西。但这不是我看的地方。在游戏测试期间,我大部分时间都在观察玩家的面部表情。当然,我会快速瞥一眼屏幕以了解背景,但大多数时候,我都会观察他们的面部表情,因为我不仅想看看玩家在做什么,还想看看他们在做这些事情时的感受。他们的面部表情提供了大量有关游戏的数据,而这些数据永远不会在赛后采访或调查问题中出现。

Most people who attend a playtest tend to look where the player looks. If it is a videogame, this means at the screen. This makes sense, because this way you see what the player sees. But it isn’t where I look. I spend most of my time during a playtest looking at the players’ faces. Sure, I steal quick glances at the screen for context, but mostly, I watch faces, because I don’t just want to see what the players are doing, but how they feel when they are doing it. Their facial expressions give a wealth of data about the game that will never come out in postgame interviews or survey questions.

我在街头表演时学会了这一点。在街头表演时,你唯一能赚到的钱就是最后传递帽子时得到的钱。所以,如果你想在那天晚上吃晚饭,确保你吓到的人群保持娱乐就变得至关重要。经过练习,我很快发现我可以快速“读懂”人群的情绪,并会适当调整我的表演——延长他们喜欢的部分,快速跳过让他们感到无聊的部分。当我开始制作电子游戏时,我非常惊讶地发现自己在玩游戏时能够读懂玩家的情绪,并确定游戏应如何改变以改善玩家情感体验的质量。这是我们所有人都有能力做到的事情——只是需要练习。

I learned to do this when I was a street performer. When you do street shows, the only money you get is what you collect by passing the hat at the end. So, if you want to have dinner that night, it becomes crucial to ensure the crowd you’ve scared up stays entertained. With practice, I soon found I could “read” the emotions of a crowd quickly and would tune my performance appropriately—stretching out parts they enjoyed and moving quickly through parts that bored them. I was quite surprised, when I started making videogames, to find myself reading the emotions of the players as they played and determining how the game should change to improve the quality of the players’ emotional experiences. This is something that we are all equipped to do—it just has to be practiced.

当然,如果我们的眼睛可以同时看到所有地方,那就最好了:在比赛中,在球员的脸上,甚至在他们的手上,看看他们是否像我们期望的那样使用控件。借助现代视频技术,您可以看到一切!设置几个不同的摄像头以馈送到单个分屏图像可以很好地同时记录比赛、面部和手部,这样您就可以稍后再回头查看这三件事是如何相互关联的。

Of course, it would be best if our eyes could be everywhere at once: on the game, on the players’ faces, and even on their hands, to see if they are using the controls as we would expect. And with modern video technology, you can see it all! Getting a few different cameras set up to feed to a single split-screen image can be a great way to record the game, face, and hands at the same time, so you can go back later and see how all three of these things interrelate.

游戏过程中您还应该收集哪些数据?

What Other Data Should You Collect During Play?

亲眼观看并录制游戏视频可以为您提供很多有用的信息,但您还可以收集其他信息。只要稍加计划,您就可以找到在每次游戏过程中记录重要游戏事件的方法。如果您的游戏是数字化的,您可以自动记录所有这些,但如果您的游戏不是数字化的,您只需在这些重要事件发生时仔细记录即可。当然,构成“重要事件”的内容因游戏而异。以下是您可能想要收集的一些数据示例:

Watching with your own eyes and recording video of a play session can give you a lot of useful information, but there is other information you can gather as well. With a little planning, you can find ways to keep logs of important game events during each play session. If your game is digital, you can log all this automatically, but if your game is not, you can just make careful notes when these important events occur. What constitutes an “important event” will vary from game to game of course. Here are some examples of data you might want to collect:

  • 玩家在角色创建器中花​​了多长时间?

  • How long did players spend in the character creator?

  • 要打败恶棍需要多少次打击?

  • How many hits did it take to defeat the villain?

  • 玩家的平均得分是多少?

  • What was the average player score?

  • 哪些武器使用最多?

  • Which weapons were used the most?

您的游戏越能自动收集这些数据,这些数据对您就越有用。在过去几年中,对于任何创建 MMO 或免费游戏的人来说,拥有一套严格的分析系统和内容管理系统已经成为必需,这样才能永久地进行持续的调整和测试。这种新型“定量设计”有其危险性——它可能导致设计枯燥乏味,并让您害怕相信自己作为设计师的直觉,但如果您可以克服这一点,它就是一门微妙的艺术,可以为您提供了解玩家行为的新机会。

The more your game can collect these data automatically, the more useful the data will be to you. In the past few years, it has become a necessity for anyone creating an MMO or free to play game to have a rigorous system of analytics in place accompanied by a content management system so that a continuous system of tuning and testing can be taking place in perpetuity. This new kind of “quantitative design” has its dangers—it can lead to dull designs and fear of trusting your own instincts as a designer, but if you can overcome that, it is a subtle art that gives you new opportunities to understand player behavior.

我会在游戏中期打扰玩家吗?

Will I Disturb the Players Midgame?

这是一个微妙的问题。当你在游戏中途打扰玩家时,比如问他们正在做什么,你就有可能干扰他们自然的游戏模式。另一方面,在正确的时刻提出正确的问题可能会让你获得你无法通过其他方式获得的见解。你可能会说,最好只是记下你心中的问题,然后在游戏结束时询问玩家。但到那时,玩家已经处于不同的精神状态,可能不记得你在说什么。这是一个艰难的权衡。大多数设计师似乎只倾向于在玩家做出设计师无法理解的令人惊讶的事情时进行打断。

This is a delicate question. When you disturb players midgame, perhaps to ask them a question about what they are doing, you run the risk of interfering with their natural play patterns. On the other hand, asking the right question at the right moment may give you an insight you would not have had any other way. You might argue that it is best to just make a note of the question you have in mind and ask the player about it when the play session is over. But by that time, the player is in a different state of mind and may have no recollection of what you are talking about. It is a difficult trade-off. Most designers seem to favor only interrupting when the player is doing something truly surprising that the designer does not understand.

人机交互专家经常推荐“出声思考协议”来学习人们与软件产品交互时的决策过程。这个想法是鼓励使用软件的人将他们内心的所有想法用语言表达出来,形成一种意识流的漫谈。在游戏中,这可能听起来像这样:“让我们看看……我应该找到香蕉,但我没有看到……我想知道那根木头后面是什么……唷!坏人!哎哟!拿着!好吧……嘿,那座山上有香蕉吗?”等等。在游戏中,这可能很棘手。对于某些人来说,说出自己的想法会改变他们的行为方式——他们的行为通常会变得更加深思熟虑和谨慎,因此出声思考协议可能会影响游戏模式。其他人在尝试同时玩游戏和说话时会变得麻木不仁,当游戏变得紧张时,他们通常会完全停止说话,这令人沮丧,因为这些紧张的时刻往往是设计师最需要了解玩家想法的时候。然而,对于一些玩家来说,大声思考是非常自然的,并且可以提供非常有用的信息——诀窍是识别这些玩家或训练重复游戏测试者做好这一点。我见过好心的互动专家在游戏过程中不断向玩家提出问题,试图引发大声思考,结果彻底毁了游戏测试。何时以及是否使用这种技巧,你需要自己决定。

Experts in human computer interaction often recommend the “think-aloud protocol” to learn the decision-making process of people interacting with software products. The idea is that you encourage the person using the software to verbalize all their internal thoughts into a kind of stream-of-consciousness ramble. With a game, this might sound something like: “Let’s see… I’m supposed to find bananas, but I don’t see any… I wonder what’s behind that log… Yow! Bad guys! Ouch! Take that! Okay… Hey, is that a banana up on that hill?” etc. With games, this can be tricky. For some people, the act of speaking their thoughts changes the way they behave—often their behavior becomes more thoughtful and careful, so the think-aloud protocol can taint play patterns. Other people become paralyzed trying to play and talk at the same time, and when the gameplay gets stressful, they often stop talking altogether, which is frustrating, because these stressful moments are often when a designer needs the most insight into what a player is thinking. However, for some players, thinking aloud comes very naturally and can provide very useful information—the trick is identifying these players or training repeat playtesters to do it well. I have seen well-meaning interaction experts completely ruin playtests by constantly peppering players with questions during play in an attempt to elicit think-aloud. When and whether to use this technique is something you will need to decide for yourself.

游戏结束后我将收集哪些数据?

What Data Will I Collect after the Play Session?

只需观察玩家与游戏的互动,您就能获得大量信息。但通过访谈和调查等有意义的后续问题,您可以获得更多的信息。但您应该选择哪一种呢?

You will gain a tremendous amount of information just by observing players interacting with your game. But you can gain even more with meaningful follow-up questions with interviews and surveys. But which should you choose?

调查

Surveys

调查问卷是让玩家回答有关您的游戏的简单问题(这些问题很容易量化)的好方法。以下是充分利用调查问卷的一些技巧:

Surveys are a great way to have players answer straightforward questions about your game that are easily quantified. Here are some tips for getting the most out of surveys:

  1. 询问游戏元素或场景时,尽可能使用图片,以帮助确保玩家了解您的意思。

  2. Use pictures whenever possible, when asking about game elements or scenes, to help ensure the player knows what you mean.

  3. 在线调查可以为您(和您的游戏测试员)节省大量时间。SurveyMonkey 或 Google Forms 等系统易于设置,而且免费或价格低廉。

  4. Online surveys can save you (and your playtesters) a lot of time. Systems like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms are easy to set up and are free or inexpensive.

  5. 不要要求人们按 1 到 10 的等级对事物进行评分。如果你使用五点量表,你会得到更一致的结果,其中每个点都有明确的标记,例如

    • 糟糕的

    • 很糟糕

    • 一般般

    • 好的

    • 出色的

  6. Don’t ask people to rate things on a scale from 1 to 10. You will get more consistent results if you use a five-point scale, where each of the points is clearly labeled, such as

    • Terrible

    • Pretty bad

    • So-so

    • Good

    • Excellent

  7. 不要在调查问卷中提出太多问题,否则人们在调查结束时就会开始失去兴趣,而您的结果也不会有太大价值。

  8. Don’t put too many questions on your survey, or people will start to tune out near the end, and your results won’t be worth much.

  9. 在他们玩完之后,趁他们记忆犹新的时候,立即给他们做调查。

  10. Give them the survey right after they have played, while things are fresh in their mind.

  11. 安排一个人在现场回答测试人员可能对调查提出的澄清问题。

  12. Have someone on hand to answer clarifying questions that the testers might have about the survey.

  13. 注意接受调查的每位游戏测试员的年龄和性别,这样你就可以了解这些是否与玩家的意见有联系。

  14. Note the age and gender of each playtester surveyed, so you can see if these have a connection to player opinions.

  15. 不要将调查数据视为真理。您的调查不太可能真正科学,并且游戏测试者在不确定时往往会编造事实。

  16. Don’t take survey data as gospel. It is unlikely that your survey is truly scientific, and playtesters tend to make things up when they aren’t sure.

采访

Interviews

赛后采访是向球员提问一些简单调查表无法回答的复杂问题的绝佳方式。这也是了解他们对比赛真实感受的一种方式,因为你可以从他们的脸上看到情绪,从他们的声音中听到情绪。以下是一些采访技巧:

A postgame interview is a great way to ask players questions too complex for a simple survey sheet. It’s also a way to get a sense of how they really felt about the game, since you can see emotion in their faces and hear it in their voices. Here are some interview tips:

  • 采访时准备好问题脚本。留出空间以便记下他们的回答。当对话出现意外转折时,也留出空间做一般性记录(换句话说,要准备好应对意外情况!)。

  • Have a script of questions ready when you interview people. Leave space so you can write down their responses. Also leave space for general notes when the conversation takes unexpected turns (in other words, be ready for surprises!).

  • 尽可能私下采访人们。人们在一对一的情况下会比在其他人(尤其是他们认识的人)倾听的情况下更诚实地说话。如果测试者还有其他朋友在测试,请考虑在私人采访结束后再进行集体采访,看看亲密朋友之间交谈时是否会有新的信息出现。

  • Interview people privately, when possible. People will speak more honestly in a one-on-one situation than in a case where others (particularly people they know) are listening in. If the tester has other friends who are testing, consider doing a group interview only after the private interview is done, to see if new information comes out when the close friends are talking to each other.

  • 游戏测试员会避免伤害你的感情,特别是如果他们知道(或认为)你参与了游戏的制作。有时,保持客观是不够的。我有时会大张旗鼓地说“我需要你的帮助。这个游戏确实存在一些问题,但我们不确定是什么问题。如果你对这个游戏有什么不满,请告诉我,这对我很有帮助。”这让测试员可以诚实地谈论他们的好恶。

  • Playtesters will avoid hurting your feelings, particularly if they know (or think) you helped make the game. Sometimes, staying objective is not enough. I sometimes make a big show of saying “I need your help. This game has some real problems, but we’re not sure what they are. Please, if there is anything at all you don’t like about this game, it will be a great help to me if you let me know.” This gives a tester permission to speak honestly about their likes and dislikes.

  • 避免记忆测试。问玩家“在第 3 关,当你到达黄色蝴蝶时,你向左飞而不是向右飞。为什么?”这样的问题通常会让你一脸茫然。玩家忙于玩游戏;他们并不总是会形成与游戏目标不直接相关的事情的记忆。如果您需要此类问题的答案,您应该在游戏进行时询问。

  • Avoid memory tests. Asking players questions like “On level 3, when you got to the yellow butterflies, you flew left instead of right. Why?” will generally get you blank stares. Players are so busy playing the game; they don’t always form memories about things that are not immediately relevant to the goal of the game. If you need answers to questions like that, you should ask them while the game is being played.

  • 不要指望游戏测试员是游戏设计师。诸如“如果第三关更难,游戏会更好吗?”之类的问题可能无法得到您想要的结果。一般来说,玩家总是认为他们希望游戏更容易,所以他们很可能对这个问题说“不”。大多数游戏测试员不擅长思考和讨论游戏机制。问同样问题的更好方法是“第三关是否有无聊的部分?”,这可能会让您得到诚实的答案和您正在寻找的信息。

  • Don’t expect playtesters to be game designers. Questions like “Would the game have been better if level three were harder?” may not get the results you want. In general, players always think they want the game to be easier, so they are likely to say “no” to that question. Most playtesters are not skilled at thinking about and discussing game mechanics. A better way to ask the same thing would be “were any parts of level three boring?,” which will probably get you an honest answer and the information you are looking for.

  • 要求超出你的需求。与其问“你最不喜欢的部分是什么?”,为什么不问“你最不喜欢的三个部分是什么?”你会得到更多的数据,而且它会按优先级排序……玩家心中最突出的东西会排在最前面。

  • Ask for more than you need. Instead of asking “what was your least favorite part?” why not ask “what were your three least favorite parts?” You’ll get more data, and it will be sorted by priority… the thing that stands out most in a player’s mind will come first.

  • 考虑一下视频室。视频室是游戏设计师 Barbara Chamberlin 的发明,她领导着新墨西哥州立大学的学习游戏实验室。正如她所说,“视频室只是一个留出的空间,里面有摄像机或 iPad,还有一块白板,我们可以在上面写问题。当我们提示他们时,玩家一次一个地进去,阅读问题,然后思考和反思。准备好后,我们的玩家打开摄像头,直接说出答案。这对对抗群体思维非常有效,并帮助一些比较安静的玩家表达自己的意见。当我们在焦点小组或访谈中在视频室外向他们询问相关问题时,效果最好,然后他们可以进去单独提供更深入的信息或不同的观点。这是一种获得丰富反馈的绝佳方式,而且——因为一切都被记录下来了——很容易与团队和客户分享!”我完全可以证明视频室的威力——不知何故,人们会对着镜头说一些他们永远不会当着你的面说的话。

  • Consider a video closet. The video closet is an invention of game designer Barbara Chamberlin, who leads the Learning Games Lab at New Mexico State University. As she puts it, “The video closet is just a space set aside with a video camera or iPad, and a whiteboard where we can write questions. When we prompt them, players go in one at a time, read the question, and can then think and reflect on it. When ready, our player turns the camera on and just talks through the answer. This has been amazing at countering groupthink, and helping some of the quieter players offer their voice. It works best when we’ve asked them related questions outside of the closet in a focus group or interview, and then they can go in and individually provide more depth or a different perspective. It has been a fantastic way to get thick, rich feedback, and—because it’s all recorded—it’s easy to share with the team and clients!” I can absolutely testify to the power of the video closet—somehow, people will say things to a camera that they’d never say to your face.

  • 放下你的自尊。坐下来听别人告诉你你的游戏有多糟糕是非常困难的。你会忍不住站出来捍卫你的游戏,告诉他们它应该是什么样的。克制住这种冲动。在这次采访中,没有人关心游戏应该是什么样子。现在,重要的是这位游戏测试员对游戏的感觉,以及原因。当你感到这种诱惑在你内心升起时,鼓起勇气,问一些客观的问题,比如“你不喜欢它什么?”和“你能告诉我更多关于它的信息吗?”

  • Set your ego aside. It can be very hard to sit and listen to someone tell you how bad your game is. You will be sorely tempted to step in and defend your game and tell them how it is supposed to be. Resist this urge. No one cares how the game was supposed to be during this interview. Right now, all that matters is how this playtester feels about the game, and why. When you feel the temptation rise within you, steel yourself, and ask objective questions like “What don’t you like about it?” and “Can you tell me more about that?”

FFWWD

FFWWDD

FFWWDD 是 Shawn Patton 的另一个有用的缩写。这是六个容易记住的问题,玩家玩完你的游戏后,你可能会问他们这些问题。这六个问题是 Schell Games 的常用问题,所以我想在这里分享一下。

FFWWDD is another helpful acronym from Shawn Patton. It’s six easy to remember questions that you might want to ask your players after they play your game. This set of six questions is our go-to at Schell Games, so I thought I would share them here.

  1. 您刚刚玩过的游戏中最令人沮丧的时刻或方面是什么?

  2. What was the most frustrating moment or aspect of what you just played?

  3. 您最喜欢刚刚玩过的哪个时刻或哪个方面?

  4. What was your favorite moment or aspect of what you just played?

  5. 有什么事情你想做但却无法做到吗?

  6. Was there anything you wanted to do that you couldn’t?

  7. 如果您有一根魔杖可以挥动,并且能够改变、添加或删除体验中的任何内容,您会选择什么?

  8. If you had a magic wand to wave, and you could change, add, or remove anything from the experience, what would it be?

  9. 你在这次经历中做了什么?

  10. What were you doing in the experience?

  11. 您会如何向您的朋友和家人描述这款游戏?

  12. How would you describe this game to your friends and family?

我们按此顺序提问是有原因的。第一个问题(令人沮丧)让玩家有机会发泄让他们恼火的事情。第二个问题(最喜欢的)很重要,因为它会告诉你他们体验中的亮点。第三个和第四个问题(想要和魔杖)可能看起来一样……但事实并非如此。玩家倾向于在第三个问题上告诉你小愿望,但在第四个问题上真正跳出固有的思维框架。第五个问题(做)告诉你玩家的目标是什么,而第六个问题(描述)则为你提供了关于他们对整个体验要点的看法的重要信息。

We ask the questions in this order, for a reason. Question one (frustrating) gives players a chance to vent about whatever irritated them. Question two (favorite) is important because it tells you about the high point of their experience. Questions three and four (wanted and wand) might seem the same… but they aren’t. Players tend to tell you about small desires with question three, but really think outside of the box on question four. Question five (doing) tells you about what the player’s goal was, and question six (describe) gives you great information about their perceptions of the point of the overall experience.

随着技术进步、实时分析和对微交易收入的依赖变得越来越重要,游戏测试越来越多地融入到持续的游戏调整中。但不要因此而感到困惑——测试就是测试。归根结底,这一切都是为了收集有关人们喜欢什么和不喜欢什么的信息,并明智地使用这些信息来更好地选择你的设计。

As technology advances and real-time analytics and dependence on microtransaction revenue become increasingly critical, the more playtesting is merging into ongoing game tuning. But don’t let that throw you—testing is testing. In the end, it’s all about collecting information about what people like and what they don’t and intelligently using that information to make better choices about your design.

说到技术,我们怎么能读完一本五百页的电子游戏书却不谈论它呢?我想是时候了。

And speaking of technology, how have we made it through five hundred pages of a videogame book without talking about it? I guess it’s time.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 《魔法风云会》的设计演变,作者:理查德·加菲尔德。这是有史以来最成功的游戏之一背后的游戏测试过程的故事。这可以在特雷西·富勒顿的书《游戏设计工作室》以及 Tekinbas 和 Zimmerman 的《游戏设计读本》中找到。

  • The Design Evolution of Magic: The Gathering by Richard Garfield. A tale of the playtesting process behind one of the most successful games of all time. This can be found in Tracy Fullerton’s book, Game Design Workshop, and also in the Game Design Reader by Tekinbas and Zimmerman.

  • 游戏可用性:提升玩家体验,作者:凯瑟琳·伊斯比斯特和诺亚·谢弗。这是一本关于出色游戏测试的详尽、实用的文章集。

  • Game Usability: Advancing the Player Experience by Katherine Isbister and Noah Schaffer. A collection of thorough, practical writings about great playtesting.

  • 跨越主流的旅程:为我岳母准备的游戏,作者:戴夫·格罗斯曼。这篇文章完美地诠释了良好的游戏测试是什么样的。http ://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6100/a_journey_across_the_main_stream_.php

  • A Journey Across the Mainstream: Games for my Mother-in-Law by Dave Grossman. This article is a perfect illustration of what good playtesting looks like. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6100/a_journey_across_the_main_stream_.php.

  • 努力制作不烂的游戏,作者:Barbara Chamberlin。这段 20 分钟的视频包含大量实用技巧,可帮助您进行出色的游戏测试。http ://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=qx6lpeaUPSc 。

  • Trying Very Hard to Make Games that Don’t Stink by Barbara Chamberlin. This twenty minute video contains a wealth of down-to-earth tips for running great playtests. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx6lpeaUPSc.

  • Valve 的游戏测试方法:经验主义的应用,作者 Mike Ambinder。GDC 2009 的这次演讲让我们有机会了解有史以来质量最稳定的游戏工作室之一。幻灯片可在此处获取: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/GDC2009_ValvesApproachToPlaytesting.pdf

  • Valve’s Approach to Playtesting: The Application of Empiricism by Mike Ambinder. This GDC 2009 talk provided a window into one of the most consistently high-quality game studios of all time. Slides are available here: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/GDC2009_ValvesApproachToPlaytesting.pdf.

第二十 九章

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

团队利用技术打造游戏

The Team Builds a Game with Technology



29.1

FIGURE

29.1

塞缪尔进来的时候,汤姆正在画画。塞缪尔看着那幅画。“那是什么?”

“我正在想办法设计一个开门器,这样人们就不必离开自己的设备了。这是打开门闩的拉杆。”

“用什么可以打开它?”

“我认为春天很强劲。”

塞缪尔研究了一下图画。“那么,用什么来封闭它呢?”

“这根杆子在这里。它会滑到这个弹簧上,然后向另一个方向施加张力。”

“我明白了。如果大门真的是悬挂式的,那么也许也能行。而且制造和维护大门所需的时间,比从钻机上下来开大门所花的二十年时间要多一倍。”

汤姆辩解道:“有时候马会受惊……”

“我知道,”他的父亲说。“但最主要的原因是它很有趣。”

汤姆咧嘴笑了。“抓到我了,”他说。

——约翰·斯坦贝克,《伊甸园之东》

Tom was making a drawing when Samuel came in. Samuel looked at the drawing. “What is that?”

“I’m trying to work out a gate opener, so a man won’t have to get out of his rig. Here’s the pull rod to open the latch.”

“What’s going to open it?”

“I figured a strong spring.”

Samuel studied the drawing. “Then, what’s going to close it?”

“This bar here. It would slip to this spring, and give tension the other way.”

“I see. It might work, too, if the gate was truly hung. And it would only take twice as much time to make and keep up as twenty years of getting out of the rig to open the gate.”

Tom protested, “Sometimes with a skittish horse…”

“I know,” said his father. “but the main reason is that it’s fun.”

Tom grinned. “Caught me,” he said.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

科技,终于

Technology, At Last

机器并没有将人类与自然界的重大问题隔离开来,而是使人类更加深陷其中。

—安东尼·德·圣·埃克苏佩里

The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

在一本表面上旨在指导电子游戏设计的书中,等到结尾才谈论技术,这似乎有点奇怪。但这是有原因的。技术在游戏设计师的生活中占据着重要地位。就像在阳光明媚时很难研究星星一样,当技术在房间里时,很难研究游戏设计。技术总是新颖、令人惊讶,总是带来新的难题需要解决。在四要素(技术、故事、美学和机制)中,技术是最具活力、最不稳定和最不可预测的。这就像一个喝醉酒的亿万富翁出现在你的派对上——所有人的目光都集中在他身上,因为没人知道他会做什么。好吧,终于到了我们跳进阳光里,向这位喝醉酒的亿万富翁介绍自己的时候了。

It may seem strange, in a book that is ostensibly meant to instruct about the design of videogames, to wait until so near the end to talk about technology. But there is a reason. Technology looms large in the lives of game designers. And just as it is hard to study the stars when the sun is out, it is hard to study game design when technology is in the room. Technology is ever novel and ever surprising and ever presents new puzzles to solve. Of the four elements in the tetrad (technology, story, aesthetics, and mechanics), technology is the most dynamic, most volatile, and most unpredictable. It’s like having a drunken billionaire show up at your party—all eyes are on him because no one knows what he might do. Well, at long last, it is time for us to plunge into the sun, to introduce ourselves to this drunken billionaire.

那么,技术到底是什么?我们指的只是计算机和电子产品吗?不,我们指的是更广泛的东西。对于游戏设计师来说,“技术”意味着我们游戏的媒介本身——使游戏成为可能的物理对象。对于大富翁来说,技术是棋盘、纸条、代币和骰子。对于跳房子来说,技术是一支粉笔和一条人行道。对于俄罗斯方块来说,技术是计算机、屏幕和一个简单的输入设备。说技术只是构成我们游戏的物理东西似乎很明显,但这个想法有着深远的含义,因为技术进步的速度如此之快。想想自从你出生以来,已经发明了多少物理东西。一万?十万?一百万?有太多了,很难说清楚。但许多新发明都可以用来制作新类型的游戏。这很重要,因为游戏设计师的追求永远是对新事物的追求。正如我们之前所说,人们购买新游戏是因为它们是新的。由于这种对新奇事物的压力和新技术的吸引力,我们很容易被技术所能做的事情的可能性所吸引,而忘记我们的目的是创造一款伟大的游戏。

So, what is technology, anyway? Do we just mean computers and electronics? No… we mean something much broader. For a game designer, “technology” means the very medium of our game—the physical objects that make it possible. For Monopoly, the technology is a board, slips of paper, tokens, and dice. For hopscotch, it is a piece of chalk and a sidewalk. For Tetris, it is a computer, a screen, and a simple input device. Saying that technology is just the physical things our game is made of might seem obvious, but this idea has deep implications, because of how technology advances at such a rapid rate. Consider how many physical things have been invented since you were born. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? There are so many; it is hard to say for sure. But many of these new inventions can be used to make new kinds of games. And this is important because the quest of the game designer is forever a quest for the new. As we’ve said before, people buy new games because they are new. Because of this pressure for novelty and the sexiness of new technology, it can be easy to get swept away in the possibilities of what technology can do and forget that our purpose is to create a great game.

保持头脑清醒,不和亿万富翁一起喝得酩酊大醉,对某些人来说可能是一个挑战。尤其是工程师,他们天生热爱科技,尤其容易被科技的诱惑所迷惑。沃尔特·迪斯尼对此有很强烈的感受,在里程碑式的著作《生命的幻觉》中,动画师弗兰克·托马斯和奥利·约翰逊讲述了这一点

Keeping your head about this, and not getting drunk along with the billionaire, can be a challenge for some people. Engineers, in particular, have a natural love of technology and are especially prone to its siren song. Walt Disney had very strong feelings about this, and in the landmark book, The Illusion of Life, animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson relate that

出于某种原因,[沃尔特]不信任工程师,因为他们设计产品主要是为了自己,而不考虑产品的预期用途,因此他拒绝让任何有“工程师”头衔的人加入员工队伍。

For some reason, [Walt] had a distrust of engineers as men who designed primarily for themselves without regard to the intended use of the product, and he refused to have anyone on the staff with the title, “Engineer.”

当然,这是一种极端的立场,但它强调了在你所创造的体验中保持冷静认识技术地位的重要性。

This is an extreme position, of course, but it underlines the importance of keeping a level head about the place of technology in the experience on you are creating.

基础性与装饰性

Foundational vs. Decorational

保持对技术的理智看法的最具体方法之一是了解基础技术和装饰技术之间的区别。基础技术是使新体验成为可能的技术。装饰技术只是让现有的体验更好。我发现这个例子有助于说明这一点:

One of the most concrete ways to keep a sane perspective about technology is to understand the difference between foundational and decorational technologies. Foundational technologies are the ones that make a new kind of experience possible. Decorational technologies just make existing experiences better. I find that this illustration helps to make it clear:



29.2

FIGURE

29.2

纸杯蛋糕的蛋糕部分是基础技术。没有它,就不可能有纸杯蛋糕。樱桃和糖霜是装饰技术。添加它们并不会带来全新的事物;它只会让旧事物变得更美好。也许娱乐和游戏中的一些例子可以帮助我们更清楚地理解这一点。

The cake part of the cupcake is foundational technology. Without it, there couldn’t be a cupcake. The cherry and the icing are decorational technology. Adding them doesn’t make something fundamentally new; it just makes something old a little nicer. Perhaps some examples from entertainment and games will help make this even clearer.

米奇的第一部动画片

Mickey’s First Cartoon

智力竞赛节目中经常会出现一个常见的琐事问题:“米老鼠的第一部动画片是什么?”我们大多数人都知道答案:《威利号汽船》。而结果发现,我们大多数人都错了。《威利号汽船》之前的是另一部比它早六个月发行的米奇动画片《疯狂飞机》。 《威利号汽船》有什么了不起之处,让它被普遍认为是米奇的处女作?是技术。具体来说,《威利号汽船》是第一部采用同步声音的动画片。而且声音并不是装饰性的——整部动画片都是围绕同步音轨设计的。《威利号汽船》的故事情节主要讲述米奇和米妮演奏各种农场动物,就好像它们是乐器一样。这个情节很可爱、聪明、朗朗上口,如果没有同步声音,它就没有任何意义。技术是这部动画片创造的体验的基础。后来,同步声音被添加到《疯狂飞机》中,但它只是装饰性的:飞机引擎的轰鸣声对动画片的基本体验几乎没有改变。

A common trivia question often pops up on quiz shows: “What was Mickey Mouse’s first cartoon?” And most of us know the answer: Steamboat Willie. And most of us, it turns out, are wrong. Steamboat Willie was predated by Plane Crazy, another Mickey cartoon that was released six months earlier. What was so remarkable about Steamboat Willie that it is universally remembered as Mickey’s premiere? Technology. Specifically, Steamboat Willie was the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound. And the sound was not decorational—the entire cartoon was designed around having a synchronized soundtrack. The storyline in Steamboat Willie primarily features Mickey and Minnie playing various farm animals as if they were musical instruments. It was cute, clever, and catchy, and without synchronized sound, it would have made no sense whatever. The technology was foundational to the experience the cartoon created. Later, synchronized sound was added to Plane Crazy, but it was decorational: the sounds of growling airplane engines did little to change the fundamental experience of the cartoon.

鲍鱼

Abalone



29.3

FIGURE

29.3

一个有趣的基础技术的低技术示例可见于1987 年由 Laurent Levi 和 Michel Lalet 发明的棋盘游戏Abalone。游戏棋盘看上去类似于我们熟悉的中国跳棋,但两者有一个重要区别:棋盘孔之间的凹槽使得可以抓取一颗弹珠并推动它,从而推动整排弹珠沿着凹槽前进,最终“咔哒”一声落入下一个棋盘。大多数类似这样的面对面游戏都以通过落在对手的棋子上或跳过对手的棋子来吃掉它为基础。Levi 和 Lalet 意识到允许推动的棋盘可以采用全新的机制,因此他们设计了一款游戏,玩家可以通过将棋子推下棋盘来吃掉它。凹槽并不是一项复杂的技术,但它们为一种全新的游戏体验奠定了基础。

A low-tech example of an interesting foundational technology can be seen in Abalone, a board game invented in 1987 by Laurent Levi and Michel Lalet. The game board looks like the familiar game of Chinese checkers, but it has an important difference: grooves between the holes make it possible to grab one marble and push it so that it pushes a whole row of other marbles along the grooves, so they “clunk” into the next holes. Most head-to-head games like this feature game mechanics based on capturing an opponent’s piece by landing on it or by jumping over it. Levi and Lalet realized that a board that allowed for pushing could feature a brand-new mechanic, and so they designed a game where you capture a piece by shoving it off the board. The grooves were not a complicated technology, but they served as the foundation for a game experience that was completely new.

刺猬索尼克

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sega Genesis 的《刺猬索尼克》《刺猬索尼克 2》游戏是基础技术的有力例证。世嘉知道,世嘉 Genesis 游戏机与竞争对手超级任天堂之间的一个关键区别在于,世嘉的系统拥有支持极快滚动的架构。 《刺猬索尼克》游戏(尤其是拥有闪电般快速旋转冲刺的《刺猬索尼克 2》)专门为利用这一能力而设计。玩家从未玩过具有如此快速移动的游戏,这也是让游戏感觉激动人心和新颖的原因之一。

The Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 games for the Sega Genesis were powerful examples of foundational technology. Sega knew that one of the key differentiators between the Sega Genesis console and the competition, Super Nintendo, was that Sega’s system had an architecture that supported incredibly fast scrolling. The Sonic games (especially Sonic 2 with its lightning-fast spin dash) were designed expressly to exploit this ability. Players had never before played a game that featured such incredibly fast movement, and this is part of what made the games feel exciting and new.

神秘岛

Myst

今天很难理解Myst在市场上有多么成功。它连续 5 年每月都是最畅销的 PC 游戏。哇。无论如何,这种成功归功于基础技术和装饰技术的结合。第一种技术是装饰性的:华丽的 3D 艺术品。当时 (1993 年),计算机生成的 3D 艺术品是一种新奇事物。它看起来超凡脱俗,新颖别致。但要在游戏中提供这些漂亮的图片,需要一种更基础的技术:CD-ROM 驱动器。在 CD-ROM 出现之前,游戏中的图像细节主要局限于像素艺术。CD-ROM 使充满照片质量的华丽图像的游戏成为可能。Cyan(Myst的制造商)对此非常重视。CD-ROM 驱动器刚问世时,非常不稳定。有许多不同的制造商、许多不同的驱动程序,软件故障的方式也有很多。 Cyan 有意识地选择花时间开发以确保他们的游戏可以在所有可能的 CD-ROM/PC 组合上运行——团队中的一些人宁愿花时间让游戏有一个更精致的结局。但看来他们做出了正确的决定——多年来,几乎每个为家里购买 CD-ROM 驱动器的人都买了一份Myst,因为他们听说它很漂亮,而且与许多其他 CD-ROM 游戏不同,这款游戏保证可以运行。

It is hard today to comprehend how successful Myst was in the marketplace. It was the top selling PC game every month for five consecutive years. Yow. Anyway, this success came because of a mix of foundational and decorational technologies. The first technology was decorational: gorgeous 3D artwork. At the time (1993), computer-generated 3D artwork was something of a novelty. It had a look that was otherworldly and new. But to deliver these pretty pictures in a game required a more foundational technology: the CD-ROM drive. Before the CD-ROM, the detail of imagery in games was mostly limited to pixel art. The CD-ROM made possible games full of glorious images of photographic quality. And Cyan (the makers of Myst) took this very seriously. When CD-ROM drives first came out, they could be very flaky. There were many different manufacturers, many different drivers, and many ways for the software to fail. Cyan made a conscious choice to spend development time making sure their game ran on every possible CD-ROM/PC combination—time that some on the team would rather have spent giving the game a more elaborate ending. But it would seem they made the right decision—for years, nearly everyone who bought a CD-ROM drive for their home bought a copy of Myst, because they heard it was beautiful, and unlike many other CD-ROM games, this one was guaranteed to work.

旅行

Journey

不,不是那个《风之旅人》。20 世纪 80 年代初,Bally Midway 的工程师们对一项新的电子游戏技术有了一个好主意:为什么不在街机上装一台数码相机,这样获得高分的玩家就可以做更多的事情,而不仅仅是输入他们的姓名首字母 - 他们还可以摆姿势拍照!他们制作了一个可以拍摄优胜者黑白数码照片的原型,并在芝加哥的一家街机游戏厅试用。这可能是他们第一次恶意破坏,第二天他们惊讶地发现,几位优胜者“闪过”相机,使他们的高分榜成为低分辨率色情图片的展览。没有人能想出解决这个问题的方法,所以管理层暂停了项目的进一步开发。但团队并没有轻易放弃。他们在技术上投入了大量精力,并希望看到一些成果。成果就是《风之旅人:街机游戏》,这是一款以摇滚乐队《风之旅人》成员为头像的基本平台游戏。这些头像看起来非常奇怪,身体很小,头部很大,是乐队成员的黑白照片。这项技术最初是比较基础的东西,但最终却变成了纯粹的装饰品,而且还是相当丑陋的装饰品。这项花哨的技术无法挽救一款无聊的游戏,它失败了。

No… not that Journey. In the early 1980s, engineers at Bally Midway had a great idea for a new videogame technology: why not put a digital camera onto an arcade machine, so that players who got a high score could do more than just enter their initials—they could pose for a picture! They built a prototype that would take black and white digital photos of winners and tried it out in a Chicago arcade. In what may have been the first instance of griefing, they were shocked to visit it the next day to find that several of the winners had “flashed” the camera, making their high score list an exhibit of low-res pornography. No one could think of a way to solve this problem, so the management put a halt to further development on the project. But the team didn’t give up so easily. They had put a lot of work into the technology and wanted to see something come from it. The result was Journey: The Arcade Game, a basic platform game that featured members of the rock band Journey as avatars. These avatars were very strange looking, having tiny cartoon bodies and grossly large heads that were black and white photos of the band members. The technology, which started as something more foundational, ended up as something purely decorational and a pretty ugly decoration at that. The fancy technology could not save a boring game, and it flopped.

布娃娃物理

Ragdoll Physics

考虑“布娃娃物理”技术时,可以看到一个更现代的例子。布娃娃物理是一种操纵实时动画角色的方法,以便他们的身体能够以非预定的方式与游戏世界中的其他元素进行逼真的交互。换句话说,如果你抓住一个游戏角色的手臂并摇晃它,它的四肢就会逼真地摆动,动作完全由计算机计算 - 无需动画师。这项技术已被用于无数第一人称射击游戏中,作为一种纯粹的装饰技术:非玩家角色 (NPC) 被手榴弹击中,它的身体在空中扑通扑通地落到地上,使用实时物理数学来计算运动。尽管有时它看起来不太对劲(身体与某些类型的地形交互不良),但它是一个小小的新奇事物,工程师们喜欢它。

A more modern example can be seen when considering the technology of “ragdoll physics.” Ragdoll physics is a method of manipulating real-time animated characters so that their bodies can realistically interact with other elements in the game world in a way that is not prescripted. Put another way, if you pick up a game character by the arm and shake it around, its limbs will flop around realistically, with the movements completely calculated by the computer—no animator required. This has been used in countless first-person shooter games as a purely decorational technology: an Non-Player Character (NPC) gets hit with a grenade, and its body flops through the air and onto the ground, using the mathematics of real-time physics to compute the motion. Even though sometimes it doesn’t look right (the bodies have bad interaction with some types of terrain), it is a minor novelty and the engineers love it.

将这种用法与游戏《古堡迷踪》中相同算法的使用方式进行对比。《古堡迷踪》是故事类游戏的里程碑,部分原因是主角伊科与他试图拯救的公主之间的互动很新颖。在游戏的大部分时间里,伊科必须牵着公主的手,帮助她度过各种危险的险境。由于公主跟随伊科的方式,在伊科奔跑、攀爬和跳跃时对他每次拉手做出反应,她看起来活灵活现,这是一种全新的不同方式。游戏中的大部分谜题都基于伊科必须带领公主四处走动这一事实,而这如果没有布娃娃物理算法是不可能的。 《古堡迷踪背后的工程师和设计师找到了一种方法,将一项原本纯粹用作装饰的技术转变为前所未有的游戏体验的基础。

Contrast that use with how the same algorithms are used in the game Ico. Ico was a landmark in storytelling games, partly because of the novelty of the interaction between the main character Ico and the princess he is trying to rescue. For most of the game, Ico must lead the princess around by the hand, helping her through all kinds of dangerous perils. Because of the way the princess follows Ico, responding to every tug of his hand as he runs, climbs, and jumps, she seems alive in a way that is completely new and different. Most of the puzzles in the game are based on the fact that Ico has to lead the princess around, which would be impossible without ragdoll physics algorithms. The engineers and designers behind Ico found a way to take a technology that had been used purely as a decoration and turn it into the foundation of a game experience the world had never encountered before.

正如这些例子所示,当遇到一项新技术时,问自己“我怎样才能使其成为我的游戏的基础?”这是一个好习惯。

As these examples show, it is a good habit, when encountering a new technology, to ask yourself, “How can I make this foundational to my game?”

触摸革命

The Touch Revolution

当触控游戏首次出现在 Nintendo DS 和 iPhone 等平台上时,许多玩家都大声抱怨。触摸屏无法替代游戏手柄——也就是说,当它试图模仿游戏手柄时。很快,一些没有触控就不可能实现的游戏开始出现(例如DS 上的《Cooking Mama》或 iOS 上的《Cut the Rope》),人们的感受截然不同。故事总是一样:新技术出现,人们说它毫无意义。直到有人为它设计游戏。

When touch games first appeared, on platforms like the Nintendo DS and the iPhone, many gamers complained loudly. A touchable screen was poor substitute for a gamepad—that is, when it tried to mimic a gamepad. Soon, games started to appear that wouldn’t have been possible without touch (such as Cooking Mama on the DS or Cut the Rope on iOS), and people felt very differently. It’s always the same story: new technology appears, and people say there is no point to it. That is, until someone designs for it.

炒作周期

The Hype Cycle

避免技术醉人效果的另一个好方法是了解这种醉人的模式。Gartner Research 创建的一个模型可以最好地描述这一点,他们称之为“技术成熟度曲线”。

Another good way to ward off the intoxicating effects of technology is to understand the pattern of that intoxication. This is best described through a model created by Gartner Research, which they refer to as the Hype Cycle.



29.4

FIGURE

29.4

上图表示了一段时间内的知名度(谈论该技术的人数)。Gartner 认为,每一项新技术都会经历五个炒作阶段:

The preceding graph represents visibility (the number of people talking about it) over time. Gartner suggests that every new technology goes through five phases of hype:

  1. 技术触发点:这是指技术首次被发现或公布的时候。

  2. Technology trigger: This is when the technology is first discovered or announced.

  3. 期望膨胀的顶峰:此时谈论某项技术的人比实际体验过的人多得多。换句话说,“没人知道它到底是什么样子,但每个人都说它很棒。”推出产品(比如新款 iPhone)的公司试图充分利用人性的这种怪癖相信一项新技术会让你的梦想成真,尽管这似乎从未真正发生过。

  4. Peak of inflated expectations: This is when many more people are talking about the technology than have actually experienced it. In other words, “nobody knows what it’s really like, but everyone says it’s great.” Companies launching a product (like, say, the new iPhone) try to make the most of this quirk of human nature to believe that a new technology will make your dreams come true, though this never seems to actually happen.

  5. 幻灭低谷:当一项技术无法达到当时人们对它的狂热程度(例如,赛格威),而且人们用冷酷无情的现实眼光看待它时,它很快就会变得不再流行,甚至被人鄙视。

  6. Trough of disillusionment: When the technology can’t live up to the incredible hype that surrounded it (like, say, the Segway) and people see it in the cold, harsh light of reality, it quickly becomes unfashionable, even despised.

  7. 启蒙斜坡:渐渐地,人们和企业开始弄清楚技术真正有用和有益的领域。

  8. Slope of enlightenment: Gradually, people and businesses start to figure out the areas where the technology is actually useful and beneficial.

  9. 生产高峰期:此时,技术的好处已被广泛理解和接受。这一高峰期的高度取决于该技术的实际用途。

  10. Plateau of productivity: At this point, the benefits of the technology are widely understood and accepted. The height of this plateau is dependent on how broadly useful the technology really is.

炒作周期的有趣之处在于它每次都会发生。不知何故,人们似乎永远都不会吸取教训,他们一遍又一遍地重复同样愚蠢的行为:假设“新事物”会改变生活,当事实并非如此时,他们讨厌它,最终将它用于它擅长的事情。作为一名游戏设计师,你需要了解炒作周期,原因有三:

The funny thing about the Hype Cycle is that it happens every time. Somehow, people never seem to learn, and they repeat the same silly behaviors again and again: assuming the “new thing” will be life changing, hating it when it isn’t, and eventually using it for the things it is good at. As a game designer, you need to know about the Hype Cycle for three big reasons:

  1. 免疫力:如果您了解技术成熟度曲线,您就可以使自己免受其影响,并且不会将您的职业生涯冒险用于您实际上尚未见过的技术。

  2. Immunity: If you are aware of the Hype Cycle, you can make yourself immune to its effects and not risk your career on a technology you haven’t actually seen work.

  3. 预防:很有可能在某个时候,你会发现自己被那些对某些疯狂的新技术大肆宣传的人包围着,他们会希望你围绕它设计一款游戏。如果你能让他们了解炒作周期,你也许能让你团队避免做出危险的决定。

  4. Inoculation: Chances are good that at some point you are going to find yourself surrounded by people who have bought into the hype on some crazy new technology, and they will want you to design a game around it. If you can make them understand about the Hype Cycle, you may be able to save your team from making a dangerous decision.

  5. 筹资:这个说法不太好听。在某个时候,你将有机会向一个完全被过高的期望所迷惑的人推销你的设计,他们愿意资助你的游戏,不是因为它的优点,而是因为他们相信他们所加入的技术潮流会让他们变得非常富有。你可以试着说服他们相信事实,但这是行不通的。诀窍是在幻灭之前拿到钱,然后不管技术如何,做出伟大的东西。如果你能做到这一点,这将是一次过山车之旅,但你会制作出游戏。

  6. Fund-raising: There is no pretty way to say this. At some point, you are going to have an opportunity to pitch a design to someone who is fully under the spell of inflated expectations, and they are going to be willing to fund your game not because of its merits but because they believe that the technological bandwagon they are jumping on is going to make them very rich. You can try to persuade them of the truth, but it won’t work. The trick is to get the money before the trough of disillusionment and then to make something great, despite the technology. If you can do this, it will be a roller coaster ride, but you will get the game made.

回顾不同游戏和游戏系统的发布并思考它们的炒作周期可能会非常有趣。不过,我将把这留给读者作为练习,因为我们要讨论一个难题。

It can be very interesting to look back at the launch of different games and game systems and think about their Hype Cycles. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader, though, because we have a dilemma to discuss.

创新者的窘境

The Innovator’s Dilemma

任何从事新技术工作的人都需要注意的另一个模式是创新者的窘境(见图29.5),出自 Clayton 的同名书籍克里斯滕森:基本观点是,科技公司经常会失败,因为他们犯了一个错误,没有听取客户的意见。这听起来有悖常理——正如我们所讨论的,倾听游戏玩家的意见非常重要。但克里斯滕森谈论的是一种非常特殊的情况:一种新技术出现了,它与旧技术不同,但还不足以取代旧技术。如果你问客户对新技术的看法,他们会说“不够好”。因此,你可能会选择忽略这项新技术,专注于逐步改进旧技术。但新技术也在逐渐改进。突然之间,几乎在一夜之间,新技术就会跨越某个门槛,进入“足够好”的境界,所有旧技术的客户都会突然转而选择这种更快、更好、更便宜的“颠覆性技术”。

Another pattern anyone working with new technologies needs to be aware of is the innovator’s dilemma (see Figure 29.5), from the book of the same name by Clayton Christensen. The basic idea is that technology companies often fail because they make the mistake of listening to their customers. This sounds counterintuitive—as we’ve discussed, listening to the people who play your games is very important. But Christensen is talking about a very specific situation: where a new technology has appeared that is different and not yet good enough to replace the old one. If you ask your customers what they think of the new technology, they will say “not good enough.” As a result, you might choose to ignore this new technology and focus on making gradual improvements to your old one. But that new technology is gradually improving, too. And suddenly, almost overnight, the new technology will cross some threshold into the realm of “good enough,” and all the customers of the old technology will suddenly jump ship for this new “disruptive technology” that is faster, better, and cheaper.

我们在电子游戏中多次看到这种情况。多年来,零售 PC 游戏的制造商并没有认真对待游戏机游戏——游戏机“不够好”。然后,突然之间,他们变得认真起来。不到一年的时间,PC 游戏就从主流变成了边缘。运动控制器已经存在了二十年,但它们总是被认为太贵或不够可靠。因此,大多数游戏机制造商都没有认真对待它们。但后来,经过一系列逐步的改进和创新,任天堂发布了 Wiimote,它配备了一个“足够好”的巧妙运动控制器,并在此过程中几乎占领了游戏机市场。而现在,语音识别、人工智能 (AI)、脑电波感应等技术被忽视,因为它们对游戏来说“不够好”。如果你能设法为即将“突破”的技术设计游戏,你就能乘上一股别人没有预料到的成功浪潮——当然,前提是这些技术是基础!

We’ve seen this in videogames many times. Makers of retail PC games did not take console gaming seriously for years—consoles just weren’t “good enough.” And then, suddenly, they were. And in less than a year, PC games went from being mainstream to being fringe. Motion controllers have been around for twenty years, but they were always considered too expensive or not reliable enough. As a result, most console manufacturers didn’t take them seriously. But then, after a series of gradual improvements and innovations, Nintendo released the Wiimote, with a clever motion controller that was “good enough,” and nearly took over the console market in the process. And right now, technologies like speech recognition, artificial intelligence (AI), brainwave sensing, and many more are ignored because they aren’t “good enough” for games. If you can manage to design games for technologies that are on the verge of “breaking through,” you can ride a wave of success that no one else saw coming—provided, of course, the technologies are foundational!



29.5

FIGURE

29.5

发散定律

The Law of Divergence

当人们试图预测技术的未来时,一个反复出现的错误是:他们认为技术会融合和统一。例如,许多人预测,不久的将来,你的客厅里将有一个设备可以播放你所有的视频、音乐和游戏。但想想你的客厅里有多少个遥控器。三四个,对吧?当然,你以前只有一个——但随着技术的进步,设备的数量成倍增加。为什么?因为它总是这样。不同的技术以不同的速度发展,所以我们有不同的设备,因为如果把它们都粘在一起变成一个大的电视/电脑/音乐/视频播放器/游戏机,每次有新功能时,你就必须更换整个设备。相反,技术在发展过程中不断分化,就像加拉帕戈斯群岛上的鱼一样。通过将它们作为单独的设备,你可以混合搭配,为接下来出现的任何情况做好准备。随着我们继续开发越来越多有趣的新游戏输入和输出系统,电子游戏肯定会继续如此。

One repeated error that comes up again and again when people try to predict the future of technology: they assume that technologies will converge and unify. For example, many people predict that one day soon you’ll have one device in your living room that will play all your videos, music, and games. But think about how many remote controls are in your living room. Three or four, yes? Of course, you used to have just one—but as technology advanced, the number of devices multiplied. Why? Because it always does. Different technologies advance at different rates, and so we have different devices, because if they were all glued together into one big TV/computer/music/videoplayer/game console, you’d have to replace the whole thing every time there was one new feature. Instead, technologies constantly diverge as they evolve, like fish in the Galapagos islands. By having them as separate devices, you can mix and match and be ready for whatever shows up next. This will surely continue for videogames as we continue to develop more and more interesting new input and output systems for playing games.

不过,分歧定律也有一个例外:口袋。为了方便起见,我们口袋里的东西(如瑞士军刀和智能手机)往往融合了多种技术。口袋例外对游戏来说也很重要,但最好记住它只是一个例外。

There is an exception to the law of divergence, though: the pocket. Things we carry in our pockets (such as Swiss army knives and smartphones) tend to have a convergence of technologies, for convenience. The pocket exception is important for games, as well, but it is wise to remember it is just that: an exception.

奇点

The Singularity

我们都注意到,科技每年都在越来越强烈地影响着我们的生活。毫无疑问,科技进步的速度不仅在加快,而且在加速。随着科技的进步,预测未来变得越来越困难。一千年前,你可以相当准确地猜测出一百年后的日常生活会是什么样子。而现在,我们很难猜测十年后的生活。一些人认为,随着科技的不断加速,我们很快就无法预测一年后、一个月后,甚至未来十分钟内的生活会是什么样子。科技进步如此之快以至于我们无法做出任何预测的时刻被称为奇点,一些人预测它将在我们的有生之年到来。

We’ve all noticed how technology presses into our lives ever more strongly with each passing year. Without a doubt, the pace of technological progress is not just increasing, it is accelerating. As it does so, it becomes more and more difficult to predict the future. A thousand years ago, you could make a pretty good guess at what daily life would be like one hundred years in the future. Now it is difficult for us to make guesses at life just ten years in the future. Some people theorize that as technology continues to accelerate, soon we won’t be able to make predictions about what life will be like a year away, a month away, or eventually in the next ten minutes. The moment where technological progress is so fast that we can make no predictions whatsoever is called the singularity, and some predict it will arrive in our lifetimes.

这听起来可能有些牵强,但毫无疑问,技术变革的快速步伐对游戏设计师来说是个好消息,因为新技术意味着新的游戏可能性。此外,如果创造和体验虚拟现实的技术突然飞跃,我们开发引人入胜的虚拟世界的技术(现在被认为是一种有趣的消遣)可能会发展成为人类体验本质的核心,这也并非不可能。

This may sound farfetched, but there is no doubt that the rapid pace of technological change is good news for game designers, since new technologies mean new game possibilities. Further, it is not out of the question that our techniques of developing engaging virtual worlds, now considered merely an amusing pastime, may blossom into something central to the nature of human experience if the technologies for creating and experiencing virtual realities take sudden leaps forward.

技术是游戏的媒介,也是游戏设计的四大基石之一。使用此便捷的镜头仔细检查您的技术选择。

Technology is the medium of your game and one of the four cornerstones of game design. Use this handy lens to examine your technological choices carefully.

看看你的水晶球

Look into Your Crystal Ball

不确定地预见比完全不预见要好得多。

—亨利·庞加莱

It is far better to foresee without certainty than not to foresee at all.

—Henri Poincaré

对于盲人来说,一切都是突然的。

-匿名的

To the blind, all things are sudden.

—Anonymous

技术快速变化的一个影响是,人们过于专注于了解现有的新技术,而不再考虑下一步会发生什么。他们对如此多的创新感到厌倦,已经放弃了预测未来的尝试,认为这太难了。这对你来说是巨大的优势——如果你坐下来仔细思考,很多未来的事情都可以猜测到。如果你能猜对,这对你,设计师来说是多么的好处啊!你将能够为除了你之外没有人预见到的趋势和发展做好准备,因为你在事情到来之前就运用了逻辑和理性来预测未来。当然,你不会总是猜对,但每次你预测错误,你会意识到原因,下次预测会更准。尝试预测未来的行为本身就能改变你看待世界的方式。尝试以下示例:

One effect of rapid technological change is that people get so caught up trying to understand the new technology that is here now; they stop thinking about what is coming next. Weary with so much innovation, they have given up on trying to predict the future, believing it to be too difficult. This is to your tremendous advantage—for a great deal of what is to come can be guessed at, if you sit down and carefully think it through. And what a benefit to you, the designer, if you can guess right! You’ll be able to prepare for trends and developments that no one else saw coming, except you, because you used logic and reason to see what was coming before it arrived. You won’t always get it right, of course, but each time you get it wrong, you’ll realize why, and it will make you a better predictor next time. The very act of trying to predict the future can change the way you see the world. Give it a try with some of these examples:

  • 四年后客厅游戏会是什么样子?它会和我们现在的有什么不同?

  • What will living room gaming be like in four years? How will it differ from what we have now?

  • 那么八年后呢?

  • How about eight years from now?

  • 两年后,有多少比例的游戏是通过下载而不是从磁盘或卡带中加载的?为什么?五年后呢?

  • Two years from now, what percentage of games will be downloaded, as opposed to being loaded from a disk or cartridge? Why? How about five years from now?

  • VR 会成为主流游戏平台吗?为什么会或者为什么不会?

  • Will VR ever become the dominant gaming platform? Why or why not?

  • 网络游戏的下一个趋​​势是什么?为什么?

  • What will the next trend in online games be? Why?

  • 四年后小型游戏工作室将会致力于什么?

  • What will small game studios be working on four years from now?

  • 四年后大型游戏工作室将会致力于什么?

  • What will large game studios be working on four years from now?

  • 四年后体育比赛将会有何不同?

  • How will sports games be different four years from now?

  • 四年后第一人称射击游戏将会有何不同?

  • How will first-person shooters be different four years from now?

  • 四年后您选择的流派会有何不同?

  • How will the genre of your choice be different four years from now?

  • 未来四年会出现哪些新流派?为什么?

  • What new genres might appear in the next four years? Why?

回答这样的问题可能很难。与他人讨论会有所帮助。这样做时,你会发现自己正在策划可能发生的事情,并利用这些确定性作为你不太自信的预测的支架。对你来说有价值的不是预测本身,而是你为做出预测而创建的支架。你不仅会培养对技术的直觉,还会培养它如何与人类思维相适应的直觉,因为了解这两者对于预测未来都是必要的,或者就像我喜欢说的那样,技术 + 心理学 = 命运。此外,预测未来的尝试通常会迫使你研究历史趋势,这会给你真正有用的见解,而且这些见解通常是正确的。我创建了一个 YouTube 频道,你可以在http://crystalballsociety.com找到,我在那里收集了我和其他人对未来做出具体预测的视频。我很乐意把你的也加进去!通过练习,试图预测技术的未来似乎并不那么难,而且会开始成为习惯。谁不想预见未来呢?

Answering questions like this can be tough. It helps if you discuss them with others. As you do so, you’ll find yourself plotting out things that are likely to happen and using those certainties as a scaffolding for your less confident predictions. It is not the predictions themselves that will be valuable to you, but rather the scaffolding that you create to make them. You will develop not just an instinct about technology but also how it fits with the human mind, for knowledge of both is necessary to predict the future, or as I like to say, technology + psychology = destiny. Further, attempts to predict the future often force you to examine historical trends, which give you insights that you can really use, and that are often correct. I’ve created a YouTube channel that you can find at http://crystalballsociety.com where I collect videos of myself and others making concrete predictions about the future. I’d love to include yours! With practice, trying to predict the future of technology won’t seem like such hard work and will start to become habitual. And who doesn’t want to see into the future?

在继续讨论之前,我们应该花点时间考虑一下为什么人们对科技如此兴奋。当然,正如我们在第 16 章兴趣曲线中讨论的那样,技术带来的巨大变化的潜力自然会令人感兴趣。但还有更多的东西。技术提供的东西是每个活着的人都追求过的东西:乌托邦。对乌托邦的渴望是我们所有人的共同点。对完美世界的梦想是许多事物背后的驱动力:学校、教堂、政府、法律、发明、互联网初创企业、医疗保健计划、革命、非营利组织、书籍、艺术,当然还有视频游戏。在某些方面,尤其是视频游戏。毕竟,我们承诺的是什么?不仅仅是游戏,而是整个世界——比这个世界更令人兴奋、更美丽、更公正的世界。从这个角度来看,难怪我们所创造的东西会出现这样的炒作周期。玩家唯一期待的就是我们带领他们走向乌托邦。而当他们不再关心我们的新游戏和系统时(有时会发生这种情况),这意味着他们对我们失去了信心——他们不再相信我们知道该怎么做。

Before we move on, we should take a moment to consider why it is that people get so excited about technology. Certainly, as we discussed in Chapter 16: Interest Curves, the potential for dramatic change that technology offers is going to be naturally interesting. But there is something more. There is something that technology offers that every human being who ever lived has sought: utopia. A desire for utopia is something we all have in common. The dream of a perfect world is the driving force behind so much: schools, churches, governments, laws, inventions, Internet start-ups, health-care plans, revolutions, nonprofit organizations, books, art, and, yes, video games. In some ways especially video games. After all, what is it that we promise? Not just games, but whole worlds—worlds that are more exciting, more beautiful, and more just than this one. Viewed this way, it is no wonder there is such a Hype Cycle around what we create. Players expect nothing less than for us to lead them to utopia. And when they stop caring about our new games and systems, as sometimes happens, it means they have lost their faith in us—that they no longer believe we know the way.

这就是为什么当你选择新技术时,选择那些最有可能让世界变得更美好的技术是至关重要的。目前,我相信这五种技术最有可能实现这个梦想。

This is why it is of the utmost importance that when you choose new technologies, you choose the ones most likely to lead to a better world. At this point in time, I believe that these five types of technology have the best chance of fulfilling that dream.

  1. 神奇的界面:直观的界面是不够的;玩家想要的是具有神奇感觉的界面。iPhone 和 iPad 的成功很大程度上就是基于这种神奇的感觉。人们可以争论微软 Kinect 系统的整体价值,但没有人可以争论数百万台渴望尝试神奇新界面的玩家购买的量。

  2. Magical interfaces: Intuitive interfaces are not enough; players want interfaces that feel magical. The success of the iPhone and iPad was largely centered on that magical feeling. One can debate the overall value of the Microsoft Kinect system, but no one can debate the millions of units that were purchased by players eager to try out a magical new interface.

  3. 公平支付:过去十年,随着许多实验的进行,电子游戏的购买模式发生了根本性变化。但玩家仍然认为我们销售游戏的系统并不完全公平。如果你能想出一个玩家认为公平的系统,同时仍然保持你创造优秀游戏的能力,玩家和开发者都会效仿你的做法。

  4. Fair payment: The models for how videogames are purchased have changed radically over the last decade, as many experiments have taken place. And still, players don’t find the systems we have for selling games to feel entirely fair. If you can come up with a system that players find fair, while still sustaining your ability to create great games, players and developers alike will follow your lead.

  5. 少一点 A,多一点 I:也就是说,人工智能感觉起来不那么人工。计算机革命的一个未实现的承诺是计算机能够像人类一样思考和交流。我们还有很长的路要走——但最先实现这一目标的技术将是游戏,因为我们的人工智能不必完美,但必须有趣。我们已准备好迎接十年来引人入胜的游戏人工智能发展,这些发展将吸引全世界的想象力。

  6. Less A, more I: That is, AI that feels less artificial. One of the broken promises of the computer revolution was computers that would think and communicate like humans. We’re still a long way off—but the technology that will get there first will be gaming, because our AI doesn’t have to be perfect, but it just has to be interesting. We are well poised for a decade of fascinating game AI developments that will capture the world’s imagination.

  7. 家人和朋友:正如我们所说,人们通常不会独自玩游戏。他们通常更愿意与家人和朋友一起玩。虽然有些游戏对某些关系很有用,但人们错过了很多机会。丈夫和妻子会夜复一夜地一起开心玩的游戏在哪里?可以让全家人一起完成任务的游戏在哪里?可以帮助孩子与远方的祖父母建立联系的游戏在哪里?像 Words with Friends 这样的游戏的成功开始指明方向,但仍有许多机会。

  8. Family and friends: As we’ve said, people generally don’t play games to be alone. They’d usually rather play them with family and friends. And while we have some games that work well for some relationships, there are so many opportunities that have been missed. Where are the games that a husband and wife will delightedly play together, night after night? Where are the games that put a whole family on a quest? Where are the games that help children connect with their remote grandparents? The success of games like Words with Friends begins to point the way, but so many opportunities remain.

  9. 转变:人们玩游戏是为了获得轻松的娱乐,没错——但是如果你能制作出能帮助人们变成他们真正想成为的人的游戏,从精神、身体和灵魂上改变他们,那会怎样?这很难实现,但需求量很大,正如 Wii Fit 和 Lumosity 等产品的成功所表明的那样。如果你选择帮助人们改善自我的技术,你无疑将带领我们走向一个更美好的世界。

  10. Transformation: People play games for light amusement, yes—but what if you could make games that help people change into the people they truly want to be, transforming them mentally, physically, and spiritually? This is hard to deliver, but there is great demand for it, as the success of things like the Wii Fit and Lumosity has shown. If you choose technologies that help people improve themselves, you will undoubtedly be leading us to a better world.

通过游戏实现乌托邦的想法很重要,尽管有点违反直觉。带着这个镜头就像拿着火炬一样,它会帮你照亮前路。

The notion of utopia through games is an important, though counterintuitive, idea. Carry this lens like a torch to help you light the way.

天哪,多么美的梦啊。不过我得叫醒你——客户刚刚走进来。

My, what beautiful dreams. I need to wake you up, though—the client just walked in.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 克莱顿·克里斯坦森的《创新者的窘境》《创新者的解决方案》。这两本书是技术创新的真正挑战及其克服方法的绝佳案例研究。

  • The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen. These books are excellent case studies of the true challenges of technical innovation and how to overcome them.

第三 十章

CHAPTER THIRTY

你的游戏可能会有一个客户端

Your Game Will Probably Have a Client



30.1

FIGURE

30.1

形式服从功能。

—建筑师 Louis Sullivan

Form follows function.

—Louis Sullivan, architect

形式追随乐趣。

—玩具设计师 Susannah Rosenthal

Form follows fun.

—Susannah Rosenthal, toy designer

形式跟随资金。

—布兰·费伦,现实主义者

Form follows funding.

—Bran Ferren, realist

谁在乎客户的想法?

Who Cares What the Client Thinks?

在完美的世界中,作为游戏设计师,您只需要担心取悦两组人:(1)您的团队和(2)您的玩家。

In a perfect world, you, as a game designer, would only have to worry about pleasing two groups of people: (1) your team and (2) your players.

但这不是一个完美的世界,在大多数情况下,你还需要考虑其他人:你的客户。

But this is not a perfect world, and in most cases, there is someone else you have to think about: your client.

有时,客户是游戏发行商,有时是拥有热门游戏版权的媒体公司,有时只是没有娱乐经验的人,出于某种原因决定需要一款游戏。客户的形式和规模各有不同。

Sometimes this client is a game publisher, sometimes it is a media company that holds the rights to a popular franchise, and sometimes it is just someone with no entertainment experience who has decided they need a game for some reason. Clients come in all shapes and sizes.

你为什么要关心客户的想法?除非你只是把制作游戏当作一种爱好,或者你非常富有,否则客户很可能是付钱让你制作游戏的。如果他们不喜欢事情的发展,那么游戏就真的结束了。

Why do you care what the client thinks? Well, unless you are making your game as a hobby or you are independently wealthy, the client is probably paying you to make the game. And if they don’t like the way things are going, it’s literally game over.

现在,你可能会认为客户将你视为专家——毕竟,客户自己无法制作游戏——这就是他们来找你的原因。而且,自然而然地,你可能会认为客户尊重你关于如何制作最佳游戏的意见。

Now, you might expect that the client views you as an expert—after all, the client can’t make the game themselves—that’s why they came to you. And, naturally, you might then assume that the client respects your opinions about what is going to make the best game.

有时这样的情况会发生。

And sometimes that happens.

或者说我听说是这样。

Or so I have heard.

但大多数时候,你的客户会对游戏的外观、行为和玩法有非常强烈的意见。这是理所当然的——毕竟,他们是在为此付费。你处理这些意见的能力至关重要,原因如下。世界上有两种游戏设计师:快乐的和暴躁的。快乐的设计师要么非常富有,要么善于处理客户的强烈意见。暴躁的设计师不擅长处理这些强烈的意见。这听起来可能很轻率,但我是认真的——你能否建立让你和你的客户都满意的妥协桥梁,可能是你作为游戏设计师是否会长期快乐的最重要指标。

But most of the time, your client is going to have very strong opinions about how the game should look, act, and play. And rightly so—they are paying for it, after all. Your ability to deal with these opinions is critical, and here is why. There are two kinds of game designers in the world: happy ones and cranky ones. The happy ones are either independently wealthy or good at dealing with the strong opinions of their clients. The cranky ones are not good at dealing with these strong opinions. This might sound glib, but I’m quite serious—your ability to build bridges of compromise that delight both you and your client is possibly the single greatest indicator of whether you will be happy as a game designer in the long term.

但为什么呢?客户的强烈意见有什么不好呢?如果客户有聪明的意见怎么办?这种情况是可能发生的——有时客户的意见非常深思熟虑和明智——这是一件好事。但也有其他时候客户的意见是如此愚蠢、如此愚蠢、如此虚伪,令人难以置信。你一生中听到过的一些最愚蠢的话会从客户嘴里说出来,而你必须以某种方式处理它。而很多事情都取决于你如何做:你与客户的关系、你作为设计师的声誉、你的幸福感和你的游戏。

But why? What’s so bad about the strong opinions of a client? What if the client has smart opinions? This can happen—sometimes clients have opinions that are very thoughtful and wise—and it’s a wonderful thing. But there are other times when the client will have opinions that are so idiotic, so foolish, and so hypocritical that it beggars belief. Some of the stupidest things you will ever hear in your life will come out of your client’s mouth, and somehow, you will have to deal with that. And a lot is riding on how you do: your relationship with the client, your reputation as a designer, your happiness, and your game.

应对不良建议

Coping with Bad Suggestions

许多设计师在收到客户的坏建议时,会像被车灯照到的鹿一样呆若木鸡,不知道该说什么。有三种方法可以解决这种情况:

Many designers, when they get a bad suggestion from a client, freeze like a deer in headlights, terrified of what to say. There are three ways to deal with this:

  1. 因为害怕惹恼客户而同意不好的建议。这对你的客户和你的游戏都是一种伤害。

  2. Agree to the bad suggestion, for fear of displeasing the client. This is a disservice to your client and your game.

  3. 立即告诉客户为什么他们的建议不好,这样客户就会对你很明智印象深刻。这通常会适得其反。

  4. Immediately tell the client why their suggestion is bad, so the client will be impressed with how wise you are. This usually backfires.

  5. 尝试去理解客户为什么提出这个建议。

  6. Try to understand why the client is making this suggestion.

第三个回答是正确的。当有人提出坏建议时,这并不意味着他们很愚蠢——这只是意味着他们想提供帮助。大多数情况下,当这些坏建议出现时,它就是一个未说明的问题的解决方案。这是拿出我们的老朋友镜头 14问题陈述的绝佳时机!因为如果你能弄清楚客户试图用他们的建议解决什么问题,也许你可以想出一个能更好地解决问题的解决方案,客户会很高兴。

Response number three is the right answer. When someone makes a bad suggestion, it doesn’t mean they are dumb—it just means they are trying to help. And most of the time, when one of these bad suggestions comes up, it is a solution to an unstated problem. This is a perfect time to pull out our old friend, Lens #14: Problem Statement! Because if you can figure out what problem the client is trying to solve with their suggestion, perhaps you can come up with a solution that does a better job of solving the problem, and the client will be thrilled.

例如,曾经有一款赛车游戏,开发到一半时,客户前来审核。在摆弄了几分钟原型后,他看着团队说:“这些车需要更多的镀铬。”首席美术师惊慌地看着设计师——模型基本已经完成,几个月前就得到了客户的批准。首席工程师也同样惊慌失措——性能本来就很差,添加闪亮的镀铬意味着对已经超负荷工作的 CPU 造成更多消耗。

As an example, there was once a racing game that was about halfway through development when the client came in for a review. After toying with the prototype for a few minutes, he looked at the team and said, “These cars need more chrome.” The lead artist looked at the designer in a panic—the models were mostly complete and had been approved by the client months ago. The lead engineer was similarly panicked—the performance was tough as it was and adding shiny chrome meant more drain on an already overworked CPU.

设计师本可以说“是”,也可以说“不是”,但他却说了唯一明智的话:“为什么?为什么需要更多的镀铬?”客户的回答令人惊讶:“嗯,在我玩游戏的时候,我觉得汽车的速度没有应有的快。我知道改变汽车速度对你们来说可能是一项艰巨的工作,所以我只是在想,如果你们只是在汽车上多加镀铬,它们看起来会更快。”现在,这听起来可能有点奇怪的逻辑,但请先把它放在一边,注意客户只是想帮忙!事实上,团队也有同样的感觉,觉得汽车速度太慢了,他们打算提出这个问题。他们的解决方案是让汽车移动得更快(很容易)和降低摄像机视点以使感知运动更快。他们能够在客户站在那里的情况下进行更改。他很高兴看到这一进步,也很高兴对赛车游戏的组成有了更多的了解。

The designer could have said “Yes,” and he could have said “No,” but instead he said the only wise thing: “Why? Why do they need more chrome?” And the client’s response was surprising: “Well, as I was playing, I kind of felt like the cars weren’t as fast as they should be. I know changing the car speeds would probably be a lot of work for you guys, so I was just thinking that if you just put more chrome on the cars, it would make them look faster.” Now, this might sound like some pretty strange logic, but set that aside, and take note that the client was only trying to help! In fact, the team had the same feeling that the cars felt too slow and were going to bring that up. Their solution was a combination of making the cars move faster (easy) and lowering the camera viewpoint to make the perceived motion faster. They were able to make the changes with the client standing right there. He was thrilled to see the improvement and also pleased to understand a little more about how a racing game is put together.

这是一个直接的例子,问题陈述的视角拯救了局面。人们的大脑运转很快,他们往往在确定要解决的问题是什么之前就跳到解决方案。大多数糟糕的建议都可以通过“你想解决什么问题?”这句神奇的话来解决。

This was a straightforward case of The Lens of the Problem Statement saving the day. People’s brains work fast, and they tend to jump to solutions before they even are sure what problem they are solving. Most bad suggestions can be resolved by the magic words “What problem are you trying to solve?”

不是那块石头

Not That Rock

客户让设计师抓狂的另一种完全不同的方式是,他们用与强烈意见相反的方式:不知道自己想要什么。有时,这被称为“不是那块石头”的游戏。它的运作方式如下:

A completely different way that clients drive designers crazy is by the opposite of strong opinions: not knowing what they want. This is sometimes known as the game of “Not That Rock.” It works like this:

客户:给我拿一块石头来。

设计师:好的,这个怎么样?

客户:不,不是那块石头。

设计师:哦。呃,这个怎么样?

客户:不,也不是那个。

(重复两百次。)

Client: Bring me a rock.

Designer: Okay, how about this one?

Client: No, not that rock.

Designer: Oh. Uh, how’s this?

Client: No, not that one, either.

(Repeat two hundred times.)

玩了十到二十轮这样的游戏后,设计师们经常会感到沮丧,对任何愿意听的人大喊:“我真不敢相信这个客户!他们不知道自己想要什么!”这很可能是真的。但事实上,如果他们确切知道自己想要什么,游戏不是已经设计好了吗?设计师工作的很大一部分就是帮助客户弄清楚他们想要什么。这就像倾听你的观众一样——你必须比客户自己更了解他。以下是玩“Bring Me a Rock”的正确方法:

After ten or twenty rounds of this game, designers often become frustrated, shouting to anyone who will listen, “I can’t believe this client! They have no idea what they want!” And that may well be true. But, really, if they knew exactly what they wanted, wouldn’t the game already be designed? A big part of the designer’s job is to help the client figure out what they want. This is just like listening to your audience—you must get to know the client better than he knows himself. Here’s the right way to play “Bring Me a Rock”:

客户:给我拿一块石头来。

设计师:什么样的石头?

客户:我不确定……我对岩石了解不多。

设计师:那么,你打算用它做什么呢?

客户:哦……我本来打算把它放在车道旁边并在上面画上门牌号。

设计师:啊……我想我知道一个不错的……让我给你拿几个来选一下。

Client: Bring me a rock.

Designer: What kind of rock?

Client: I’m not sure… I don’t know much about rocks.

Designer: Well, what are you going to do with it?

Client: Oh… I was going to put it by my driveway and paint a house number on it.

Designer: Ah… I think I know a good one… Let me bring you a few to choose from.

当你能够帮助客户弄清楚他们真正想要什么时,你就参与了设计过程,同时,你通过向客户提供他们所需的教育来增强他们的能力。如果你正确地玩游戏,客户会觉得自己很聪明,而你设计的游戏也完全满足了他们的需求。

When you can manage to help a client figure out what they actually want, you are engaging in the design process and, at the same time, you are empowering your client by giving them an education they need. If you play the game right, the client will come away feeling smart, and you will have designed a game that meets their needs perfectly.

欲望的三个层次

The Three Layers of Desire

要真正满足客户的需求,你必须了解什么对他们来说是重要的——你必须关心他们关心的事情,并像他们一样思考。做足功课来了解客户,无论是个人还是职业,都是值得的。他们更关心迅速致富,还是慢慢建立好游戏的声誉?他们是想进入新市场还是利用现有市场?他们认为什么样的游戏才是好的?只要和客户交谈,询问他们想要什么,你就能了解很多关于客户的信息——但请记住,人们并不总是说实话。在试图弄清楚客户想要什么时,请记住每个人都有三层欲望:语言、思想和心灵。

To really give your client what they want, you have to understand what is important to them—you have to care about what they care about and think how they think. Doing your homework to learn about the client, both personally and professionally, is time well spent. Do they care more about striking it rich quickly or slowly building a reputation for good games? Are they looking to get into a new market or to capitalize on an existing one? What do they think makes a good game? You can learn a lot about a client just by talking to them and asking what they want—but keep in mind that people don’t always tell the truth. When trying to figure out what a client wants, keep in mind that everyone has three layers of desire: words, mind, and heart.

例如,客户可能会来找你,用她的话来说:“我希望你为里滕豪斯基金会制作一款游戏。这款游戏需要教八年级学生代数。”

For example, a client might come to you and say, with her words: “I want you to make a game for the Rittenhouse Foundation. The game needs to teach algebra to eighth graders.”

但她心里可能在隐瞒一个秘密:“实际上,我想制作一款教授几何知识的太空主题游戏。我已经计划好了它应该如何运作。我之所以选择代数,只是因为里滕豪斯的人认为它很重要。”

But in her mind, she might be keeping a secret: “Actually, I want to make a space-themed game that teaches geometry. I’ve got it all planned out how it should work. I’m only going along with this algebra thing because the Rittenhouse people think it’s important.”

但她内心深处可能在想其他事情:“我厌倦了做财务人员。我想让人们看到我也有创意的一面。”

But in her heart, she might be thinking something else entirely: “I’m tired of being the financial person. I want people to see I have a creative side.”

现在,如果你只是相信她的话,你可能会发现,随着项目的进行,她会与你争辩,而且她所采取的方向似乎与资助者想要的相反,总的来说,她的行为相当奇怪。但是如果你能够了解她的想法,甚至更好的是,了解她的内心,你就可以融入她一直在想象的这个游戏中的元素,也许可以找到其他方法让她贡献创意,或者至少让她为这些创意赢得赞誉。如果你非常聪明,你很可能找到一种方法来满足这三个层次的愿望——这不是一件小事,因为当你满足了某人内心的愿望时,你可能会发现你拥有了一个终生的朋友。

Now, if you simply took her at her word, you might find, as the project proceeds, that she is fighting you on it and that she is taking it in directions that seem opposed to what the funders want, and overall, her behavior is quite strange. But if you are able to learn what is in her mind and, even better, her heart, you can possibly incorporate elements from this game she has been imagining and maybe find other ways to let her contribute creative ideas or at least take credit for them. If you are very clever, you can probably find a way to fulfill all three layers of desire—this is not a trivial thing, for when you have fulfilled someone’s heart’s desire, you may find you have a friend for life.

佛罗伦萨,1498 年

Firenze, 1498

我想用我最喜欢的一个与客户打交道的故事来结束这一章。这个故事发生在文艺复兴时期的意大利佛罗伦萨。几年前,这座城市购买了一块非常大、非常精致的大理石,准备雕刻一个雕塑,但一位不熟练的雕刻家在雕刻时在大理石上凿了一个大洞。城市失去了信心,解雇了他,而这块巨大的大理石在大教堂的院子里暴露在风吹雨淋中,腐烂了。但在 1498 年,市长皮耶罗·索德里尼发起了一场运动,要用大理石雕刻一些东西。他联系了列奥纳多·达·芬奇,但列奥纳多对用一块破损的大理石雕刻毫无兴趣。此外,他还记得前任雕塑家已经受到了不公平的待遇,他不想再受到同样的不公平待遇。但有一位雕塑家挺身而出——一个名叫米开朗基罗的 26 岁年轻人。市长怀疑这么年轻的人是否有资格,但米开朗基罗带来了一个原型:一个用蜡制成的模型,展示了他将如何精心安排人物的腿部,以应对大理石既薄又严重凿痕的事实。索德里尼和委员们对此印象深刻,并委托米开朗基罗创作大卫雕像。

I’d like to close this chapter with one of my favorite stories about dealing with clients. It happened in Florence, Italy, during the Renaissance. The city, years earlier, had purchased a very large, fine piece of marble for a sculpture, but an inexpert sculptor had set to work on it and gouged a great hole in the marble. The city lost confidence and fired him, and the great piece of marble deteriorated in the cathedral yard, exposed to the elements for many years. But in 1498, the mayor, Piero Soderini, went on a crusade to have something carved from the marble. He approached Leonardo da Vinci, but Leonardo had no interest in working with a damaged piece of marble. Besides, he remembered how the previous sculptor had been treated and wasn’t interested in getting the same shabby treatment. But one sculptor did come forward—a young man of twenty-six named Michelangelo. The mayor was skeptical that someone so young would be qualified, but Michelangelo brought a prototype with him: a model made of wax that showed how he would carefully arrange the legs of the figure to deal with the fact that the marble was both thin and badly gouged. Soderini and the commissioners were impressed and awarded Michelangelo the commission to create a statue of David.

有一天,雕像即将完工,市长决定顺便过来看看工作进展如何。大卫雕像非常大,有十四英尺高。这意味着,为了制作它,米开朗基罗必须用脚手架围绕它。当米开朗基罗在高高的脚手架上工作时,索德里尼走进脚手架,以便看得更清楚。他自认为是专家,告诉米开朗基罗,雕像很好,但显然鼻子太大了。

One day, as the statue was nearing completion, the mayor decided to drop by to see how the work was going. The statue of David is very large, fourteen feet tall. This means that to work on it, Michelangelo had to surround it with scaffolding. As Michelangelo was working away high on the scaffold, Soderini came inside the scaffolding for a clear view. Fancying himself an expert, he told Michelangelo that the statue was good, but clearly, the nose was too large.

米开朗基罗显然知道索德里尼站得太靠近雕像,无法获得合适的观看角度,因为毕竟,每个人的鼻子在直视时看起来都太大了。但同样明显的是,索德里尼的话并没有说明全部情况——他有更深层次的愿望。米开朗基罗没有试图给索德里尼上一堂透视课,而是邀请他爬上脚手架,两人一起把鼻子固定起来。当索德里尼爬上去时,米开朗基罗用小指舀起一点大理石粉末。当索德里尼处于合适的观看角度时,米开朗基罗把凿子放在鼻子附近,用锤子假装敲了几下,然后把小指上的灰尘抖掉,让它看起来像是在真正雕刻。几分钟后,米开朗基罗走开说:“现在看看它。”“我更喜欢它,”索德里尼回答说,“你让它活了过来!”

It was obvious to Michelangelo that Soderini was standing far too close to the statue for a proper viewing angle, because, after all, everyone’s nose looks too big when you look straight up at it. But it was also obvious that Soderini’s words were not telling the whole story—he had deeper layers of desire. Instead of trying to give Soderini a lesson in perspective, Michelangelo invited him to climb up the scaffold where the two of them could fix the nose together. As Soderini was climbing, Michelangelo scooped up a little bit of marble dust in his pinky finger. When Soderini was at a proper viewing angle, Michelangelo put his chisel near the nose, gave it a few pretend taps with his hammer, and dropped the dust from his pinky to make it look like actual sculpting was in progress. After a couple minutes of this, Michelangelo stepped away and said, “Look at it now.” “I like it better,” replied Soderini, “you’ve made it come alive!”

这对索德里尼来说似乎是一个残酷的玩笑。但真的是这样吗?显然,他那天来是因为他想拥有这座雕像的部分所有权——他想成为创意合作伙伴。而他离开时也确实感觉自己是。此后,如果有人批评这座雕像,你可以肯定索德里尼会第一个站出来为其辩护。我讲这个故事并不是建议你欺骗你的客户,而是强调找到让他们感觉自己是游戏创意合作伙伴的方法的重要性。做到这一点并不会影响你的创意愿景。永远记住,客户能提供的不仅仅是资金。它可能是人脉、业务专长或对你游戏受众的特殊理解。你会发现,如果你倾听客户的意见——真诚、深入地倾听他们——他们就会听你的。

This may seem like a cruel trick on Soderini. But was it? Clearly, he came that day because he wanted some ownership of the statue—he wanted to be a creative partner. And he came away feeling he was. After this, if someone were then to criticize the statue, you can be sure that Soderini would be the first to come to its defense. I tell this story not to suggest that you lie to your clients, but rather to underline the importance of finding ways for them to feel like creative partners on your game. It is possible to do this without compromising your creative vision. Always keep in mind that the client has more to offer than just funding. It may be connections, business expertise, or a special understanding of the audience for your game. You will find that if you listen to your clients—truly, deeply, listen to them—they will listen to you.

当你提出一个新想法的时候,你最需要客户听取你的意见,这就是我们下一章的主题。

When you are proposing a new idea is when you need the client to listen to you most, and that is the subject of our next chapter.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 罗伯特·格林的《权力的 48 条法则》。这本书充满了对人类状况的宝贵见解。如果你的道德感很弱,请不要阅读它。

  • The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. This book overflows with valuable insights to the human condition. Do not read it if you have a weak moral compass.

第三 十一章

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

设计师向客户推介

The Designer Gives the Client a Pitch



31.1

FIGURE

31.1

为什么是我?

Why Me?

如果你要让某人资助你的游戏、发布或分发你的游戏,你就必须说服他们你的游戏值得冒险,这意味着你要推销你的游戏。你可能会想,“为什么是我?我设计它还不够吗?别人不能做吗?”但实际上,谁比你更有资格?艺术家?工程师?管理层?作为游戏设计师,你应该比任何人都更了解游戏以及它为什么很棒。如果你对自己的游戏没有足够的信心,无法站在人们面前赞美它,那么为什么别人会相信它呢?

If you are going to get someone to fund your game, publish your game, or distribute your game, you are going to have to convince them that your game is worth the risk, and this means pitching your game. You might be thinking, “Why me? Isn’t it enough that I’m designing it? Couldn’t someone else do this?” But, really, who is more qualified than you? The artists? The engineers? The management? As the game’s designer, you should know the game and why it is great better than anyone else. And if you don’t believe in your game enough to get up in front of people and sing its praises, then why should anyone else believe in it?

那么,你会向谁推销,什么时候推销?这在很大程度上取决于你的情况。兼职独立开发者的推销要求与大公司的全职开发者不同,但两者都需要做大量的推销才能制作出成功的游戏。一开始,你会向团队成员和潜在合作伙伴推销粗略的想法。当团队就一个总体概念达成一致时,你可能会向管理层或资助者推销,以获得制作原型的批准。当原型制作完成后,你可能会向出版商或 Kickstarter 推销你的游戏,以获得开发资金。在开发过程中,当你意识到游戏必须在某些重要方面进行更改时,你会向几乎所有人推销这些更改。游戏完成后,你需要在游戏会议上向记者推销。推销的内容可以很大:“这就是为什么我需要 7500 万美元来支持我的新 AAA 游戏创意。”也可以很小:“鲍勃,这就是为什么宇宙飞船的边角需要更圆润的原因。”如果你要开发游戏,你将需要不断说服人们接受你的想法,并且你将不断处于必须让来自不同学科和背景的人团结起来支持一个想法的位置。压力最大的是那些你试图为游戏筹集资金的宣传,所以本章将更多地关注这些。

So, who will you pitch to, and when? It depends a lot on your situation. Part-time indie devs will have different pitch requirements than full-time developers in huge companies, but both will have to do a lot of pitching to make a successful game. In the beginning, you’ll be pitching rough ideas to team members and potential partners. When the team has agreed on a general concept, you might be pitching to management or to funders to get approval to build a prototype. When the prototype is built, you might be pitching your game to publishers or to Kickstarter to get development funds. And during development, when you realize that the game has to change in some important way, you’ll be pitching those changes to almost everyone. After the game is done, you’ll need to pitch it to reporters at game conferences. Pitches can be big: “Here’s why I need $75M for my new AAA game idea.” Or it can be tiny: “Bob, here’s why the corners on the spaceship need to be more rounded.” If you are going to develop games, you will constantly need to persuade people about your ideas, and you will constantly be in a position where you have to get people of every discipline and background to stand together behind an idea. The highest-pressure pitches are the ones where you are trying to get funding for the game, so this chapter will focus a little more on those.

权力的谈判

A Negotiation of Power

在讨论如何写好一份好的推销书之前,我们应该花点时间了解一下推销书到底是什么。要理解这一点,就必须了解权力是什么。权力不一定与财富或控制他人有关,尽管它可能与这些有关。权力只是得到你想要的东西的能力。如果你能得到你想要的东西,你就有权力。如果你得不到你想要的东西,你就无能为力。

Before we get into the specifics of putting together a good pitch, we should take a moment to understand exactly what a pitch is. And to understand that, it is necessary to understand what power is. Power does not have to be about wealth or controlling people, although it can be about those things. Power is simply the ability to get what you want. If you can get what you want, you are powerful. If you can’t get what you want, you are powerless.

但请注意,我们对权力的定义有两个部分:“获得的能力”和“你想要的东西”。大多数人只关注第一部分,即获得的能力。但第二部分,即你想要的东西,也同样重要。因为如果你不知道自己想要什么,你会发现自己不断地贪婪,永远不会满足。但如果你知道自己想要什么,你就可以更有效地集中精力去得到它,这样你就会变得强大。

But notice that our definition of power has two parts: “the ability to get” and “what you want.” Most people focus entirely on the first part, the ability to get. But the second part, what you want, is equally important. For if you don’t know what you want, you will find yourself continually grasping and never satisfied. But if you know what you want, you can focus your efforts much more effectively toward getting it, and in doing so, you will become powerful.

当你推销你的游戏时,你就进入了一场权力谈判,你会试图得到你想要的东西,同时你还要说服别人,你的游戏会帮助他们得到他们想要的东西。因此,任何成功推销的基础都是了解你想要什么,了解他们想要什么,这可能有点复杂,记住你们每个人都有三层欲望。

And when you pitch your game, you are entering into a negotiation of power, where you are going to try to get what you want, while you convince someone else that your game is going to help them get what they want. For this reason, the foundation of any successful pitch is knowing what you want and knowing what they want, which can be kind of complicated, keeping in mind that you each have three layers of desire.

思想的层次

The Hierarchy of Ideas

经常会听到新手设计师抱怨:“我简直不敢相信!我提出了这个很酷的想法,但没有人感兴趣!人性到底是怎么了?”答案是,人性并没有问题——只是很酷的想法在以下想法层次结构中的价值相当低:

Novice designers will frequently be heard to complain, “I can’t believe it! I pitched this really cool idea, and no one was interested! What is wrong with people?” The answer is that nothing is wrong with people—it is just that cool ideas have a pretty low value on the hierarchy of ideas shown here:

图像

我知道这很愚蠢,但关键在于,当你提出一个想法时,它不会根据其整体优点来判断,而是根据它对你提出想法的人现在有多大用处来判断。这些想法可以带来价值数百万美元的交易。当你提出一个好主意并被拒绝时,不要咬牙切齿——把它带给可以使用它的人,或者把它放在你的后口袋里,这样当它最终到来时,你就可以准备好了。

I know that’s silly, but the point is that when you pitch an idea, it won’t be judged on its overall merit—it will be judged by how useful it is, right now, to the person you are pitching it to. Those are the ideas that land deals worth millions. When you pitch a good idea and it gets rejected, don’t grind your teeth—take it to someone who can use it, or put it in your back pocket so you have it ready when its time finally comes.

成功推销的十二个秘诀

Twelve Tips for a Successful Pitch

因此,您已经了解了您的推销对象,并想出了一个他们现在可以使用的好主意,甚至知道您希望他们为您做什么。现在做什么?

So you’ve learned about who you are pitching to and have figured out a good idea that they can use now, and you even know what you want them to do for you. Now what?

推销技巧 #1:走进门

Pitch Tip #1: Get in the Door

如果你进不了门,你就无法推销你的想法。有些门很容易进,有些则不然。大型游戏发行商可能很难吸引到观众。他们就像学校里最漂亮的女孩,他们知道这一点。他们经常会忽略电子邮件和信息,几乎毫无预警地取消会议。他们有自己挑选的开发者来合作,所以除非你能说服他们你有一些非常特别的东西,否则很难进门,尤其是如果你走的是前门;也就是说,“呃,你好,这是 Big Time Games 吗?我有一个游戏设计想推销……我应该和谁谈谈?”

You can’t pitch your idea if you can’t get in the door. Some doors are easy to get into, some aren’t. Big game publishers can be very hard to get an audience with. They are like the prettiest girl at school, and they know it. They will often ignore e-mails and messages and cancel meetings with almost no warning. They have their pick of developers to work with, so unless you can convince them you have something pretty special, it can be hard to even get in the door, especially if you are using the front door; that is, “Uh, hello, is this Big Time Games? I have a game design I want to pitch… who should I talk to?”

如果可以的话,更好的方法是使用后门;也就是说,认识一些可以为你担保的内部人士。会忽略你的电子邮件的发行商不会忽略他们经常合作的人的电子邮件。我认为可以肯定地说,大多数游戏交易都是这样发生的——开发商和发行商由共同的朋友介绍给对方。这就是为什么游戏开发者大会和当地国际游戏开发者协会 (IGDA) 会议等行业活动如此重要的原因——它们帮助你建立联系网络,这样当你的宣传准备好时,你就可以进入大门。

A much better approach is to use the back door, if you can; that is, know someone on the inside who can vouch for you. A publisher who would ignore your e-mail won’t ignore the e-mail of someone they work with on a regular basis. I think it is safe to say that the majority of game deals happen this way—a developer and a publisher were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. This is why industry events like the Game Developers Conference and local International Game Developer Association (IGDA) meetings are so important—they help you build up networks of contacts so that when your pitch is ready, you can get in the door.

即使你只是在向公司内部的某个人推销,同样的原则也适用。最有权决定日程安排和预算的人是最忙的人。如果他们已经认识你、喜欢你、信任你,他们就更有可能听取你的意见并认真对待你。

Even if you are just pitching someone within your company, though, the same principle applies. The people who have the most power to make decisions about schedule and budget are the busiest. They are much more likely to hear you out and take you seriously if they already know you, like you, and trust you.

推销技巧 #2:表现出你的认真态度

Pitch Tip #2: Show You Are Serious

我在华特迪士尼幻想工程公司工作时,有一场一年两次的盛大活动,叫做公开论坛。这是一个向迪士尼主题公园的顶级创意人才推销自己绝妙想法的机会。整个组织中的任何人都可以来,向这个决策者小组做五分钟的演讲。然后他们会私下讨论五分钟,然后给你五分钟的反馈。如果他们喜欢这个想法,它就会被提升到下一个层次,并可能在公园里部署!我喜欢有机会提出新想法的想法,并会抓住一切机会。一般来说,我会做好充分的准备,但对于其中一次会议,我实在没有时间。我没有提出一个完整的想法,而是想提出两个不太完整的想法。一个是用肥皂泡制成的喷泉,另一个是餐厅的迷你篝火,这样客人可以在餐桌上烤棉花糖。当我提出这些想法时,小组提出了很多问题。喷泉真的有用吗?迷你篝火会安全吗?我是否制作了原型来回答这些问题?我不得不承认,我没有。一位小组成员愤慨地说:“如果你们对这些想法不够关心,不愿意尝试,我们为什么要这么做?”这很丢脸,但他完全正确。

When I worked at Walt Disney Imagineering, there was a remarkable event, held twice a year, called the Open Forum. It was an opportunity to pitch your brilliant idea to the top creative minds in charge of the Disney theme parks. Anyone at all in the entire organization was welcome to come and give their five-minute pitch to this panel of decision makers. They would then deliberate privately for five minutes and then give you five minutes of feedback. If they liked the idea, it would get taken to the next level and possibly get deployed in the parks! I loved the idea of getting a chance to pitch new ideas and would take advantage every time I could. Generally, I would be well prepared, but for one of the sessions, I just didn’t have the time. Instead of giving one fully fleshed out idea, I thought maybe I would come in with two less-fleshed-out ones. One was a fountain made of soap bubbles, and the other was a mini campfire for a restaurant so that guests could roast marshmallows right at their tables. When I presented these ideas, the panel had many questions. Would the fountain actually work? Would the mini campfire be safe? Had I built prototypes to answer these questions? I had to admit that I hadn’t. One panel member became indignant: “If you don’t care enough about these ideas to try them out, why should we?” It was humiliating, but he was absolutely right.

当你推销一款游戏时,你必须表明你对开发这款游戏是认真的。过去,开发者只需几张草图和一份游戏描述就能与发行商达成交易。现在这种交易越来越少见了——在这个时代,需要一个可以工作的原型。但即使是原型也是不够的——你需要表明你已经认真对待考虑你的游戏、它的市场以及它的运作方式。这可以是一份详细的设计文档(没有人会读它,但他们会权衡它),或者更好的是,用清晰的演示文稿详细说明游戏为什么会畅销。仅仅相信你的游戏会很有趣是不够的——你必须展示你已经做了一些工作来证明你的游戏会很有趣并且会盈利。

When you pitch a game, you have to show that you are serious about building it. It used to be that a developer could get a deal with a publisher just with a few sketches and a description of what the game would be like. That kind of deal is increasingly rare now—a working prototype is required in this day and age. But even a prototype is not enough—you need to show that you have given serious thought to your game, its market, and how it works. This can be with a detailed design document (no one will read it, but they will weigh it) or, even better, with a clear presentation that details why the game will sell. Believing that your game could be fun isn’t enough—you must show you’ve done the work that proves your game will be fun and will monetize.

推销技巧 #3:要有条理

Pitch Tip #3: Be Organized

组织不是负担。组织会让你自由。

—奥尔顿·布朗

Organization is not a burden. Organization will set you free.

—Alton Brown

很容易陷入“创意人士不做事有条理”的陷阱。条理只是向别人表明你很认真的另一种方式。此外,你越有条理,手边只有你需要的东西,你就会越冷静,控制力就越强。出版商会将有条理的设计师视为“低风险”设计师,这将使他们更有可能信任你。

It’s real easy to fall into the “creative people aren’t organized” trap. Organization is just another way to show someone that you are serious. Also, the more organized you are, having just what you need at your fingertips, the calmer you’ll be, and the more in control you will be. A publisher is going to see an organized designer as a “lower-risk” designer, which will make them more likely to trust you.

因此,请确保您的演讲经过精心策划。如果您携带纸质讲义,请确保它们易于取用,并且有足够的纸质讲义供每个人使用。如果您的演示涉及计算机、投影仪或(吞咽)互联网连接,请确保它们确实可以使用 - 带上所有合适的电缆,并提前到达以防万一。我曾经与某人安排了一次非常重要的演讲,我们定下了日期,但忘了定时间!前一天,我急忙联系他们,弄清楚我们的会议是否还在进行,以及具体时间!整个过程令人紧张、尴尬且没有必要。

So make sure your pitch is well planned. If you bring paper handouts, make sure they are easily accessible and that you have enough for everybody. If your presentation involves a computer, a projector, or (gulp) an Internet connection, make sure that they are really going to work—bring all the right cables, and get there early to test, just in case. I once scheduled a very important pitch with someone where we set a date but forgot to set a time! The day before I was scrambling to get in touch with them, to figure out if our meeting was still on and when exactly it would be! The whole thing was stressful, embarrassing, and unnecessary.

推销秘诀#4:要充满激情!!!!!

Pitch Tip #4: Be Passionate!!!!!

让我难以置信的是,我经常看到演讲者对他们谈论的游戏似乎有点矛盾。你想让与你交谈的人对你的游戏感到兴奋——要做到这一点,你必须对你的游戏感到兴奋!不要假装——这完全是假的。如果你在谈论你的游戏时真的、真正地对你的游戏感到兴奋,那么这种兴奋就会在演讲中表现出来,甚至可能具有感染力!激情不仅仅代表兴奋——它还代表着不惜一切代价提供优质游戏的动力和承诺。如果资助者要委托你提供制作天才游戏所需的资金,他们需要看到这种承诺。

Unbelievably to me, I see pitches all the time where the person presenting seems kind of ambivalent about the game they are talking about. You want to get the people you are talking to excited about your game—to do that, you must be excited about your game! DO NOT try to fake this—it will come off completely phony. If you are actually, genuinely excited about your game when you talk about it, it will come through in the presentation, and it might even be infectious! And passion represents more than excitement—it also represents drive and commitment to deliver a quality game at any cost. Funders need to see this kind of commitment if they are going to entrust you with the necessary funding to produce your genius game.

推销技巧#5:假设他们的观点

Pitch Tip #5: Assume Their Point of View

在前面的章节中,我们讨论了倾听观众、游戏和团队的重要性——演讲只是倾听。我们经常认为销售就是我们自己的事情——只要我们足够努力,他们就会购买。但没有人喜欢面对一个强硬、咄咄逼人的销售人员。我们喜欢的是有人倾听我们并试图解决我们的问题。你的推销应该完全围绕这一点。提前与你要推销的人交谈。了解他们的情况,确保你计划推销的游戏适合他们——如果不适合,就不要浪费他们的时间。

In previous chapters, we’ve talked about the importance of listening to your audience, your game, and your team—the pitch is just one more occasion for listening. So often we assume that selling is all about us—if only we push hard enough, they’ll buy it. But no one likes to be confronted with a hard, pushy salesperson. What we like is when someone listens to us and tries to solve our problems. Your pitch should be all about that. Speak with the person you are going to pitch to in advance. Learn what you can about them, and make sure that the game you are planning to pitch is going to be a good fit for them—if it isn’t, don’t waste their time.

即使你对所推销的游戏了如指掌,你也必须记住,推销对象从未见过这款游戏,因此一定要用他们容易理解的方式进行解释——尽可能避免使用专业术语。向不熟悉该游戏创意的朋友和同事练习推销,看看他们是否能理解。

Even though you know the game you are pitching backward and forward, you must remember the person you are pitching to has never seen it before, so make sure you explain it in a way that they will easily understand—avoid jargon wherever possible. Practice your pitch on friends and colleagues who aren’t familiar with the game idea to see if it makes sense to them.

还要记住,你要向其推销的人可能已经看过数百次推销,而且非常忙。确保你不会浪费任何时间,直奔主题。如果他们似乎对你提出的某个观点感到厌烦,请略过它并继续。如果他们想了解更多细节,他们会提出问题。

Also remember that the person you are pitching to has probably seen hundreds of pitches and is very busy. Make sure that you don’t waste any time and get straight to the point. If they seem bored with a point you are making, pass over it and move on. If there is something they want more details about, they will ask questions.

另一种从客户角度考虑问题的方法:考虑最好的情况。也就是说,他们喜欢你的推销。现在会发生什么?在大多数情况下,交易还无法达成。你推销的对象可能必须向他们公司的同事或上级推销。你让他们轻松了吗?以下是让你项目的“粉丝”更容易向其他人推销的因素:

One more way to assume the client’s point of view: consider the best-case scenario. That is, they LOVE your pitch. Now what happens? In most cases, a deal can’t happen yet. The person you pitched to probably has to pitch it to colleagues or superiors at their company. How easy have you made it for them? Here are the things that make it much easier for a “fan” of your project to pitch it to others:

  • 首先说明您的平台、受众和类型:新手设计师通常想让人们保持悬念,在演示进行到一半时才透露游戏是什么。这总是一个糟糕的想法。立即告诉他们平台、受众和类型。如果你不这样做,他们不会听你说一句话,因为他们的大脑会沉迷于试图弄清楚这是什么类型的游戏,以便他们决定是否关心它。

  • Start by stating your platform, audience, and genre: Novice designers often want to keep people in suspense, unveiling what the game is halfway through the presentation. This is always a terrible idea. Tell them, right away, the platform, the audience, and genre. If you don’t, they won’t hear a word you say because their minds will be obsessed with trying to figure out what kind of game this is so they can decide if they even care about it or not.

  • 不要以讲故事作为开场:我确信你的故事很棒。但你猜怎么着?很多糟糕的游戏都有很棒的故事,很多很棒的游戏也有糟糕的故事。不要告诉他们 Nurl 之地的传奇背景故事,而是拿出镜头 #83幻想,告诉他们游戏实现了什么幻想。

  • Do not begin by telling a story: I’m sure your story is great. But guess what? Lots of lousy games have great stories, and lots of great games have lousy stories. Instead of telling them the legendary backstory of the land of Nurl, pull out Lens #83: Fantasy, and tell them what fantasy the game fulfills.

  • 为你的想法提供“句柄”:也就是说,提供简短的短语来总结这个想法:“这是一款保龄球角色扮演游戏!”“这是成人版的神奇宝贝!”“这是任天狗,里面有一整个动物园!”这将帮助他们理解这个概念,并使他们更容易向别人解释。

  • Give your idea “handles”: That is, provide short phrases that summarize the idea: “It’s a bowling RPG!” “It’s Pokémon for grownups!” “It’s Nintendogs, with a whole zoo!” This will help them get the concept and make it easier for them to explain it to others.

  • 展示,而不是讲述:有可用的版本吗?很好——展示它!甚至更好,展示一个突出其最佳功能的视频。如果还处于早期阶段,至少要制作一个幻灯片,展示玩游戏的感觉。这是让他们了解您的想法的最佳方式。

  • Show, don’t tell: Got a working version? Great—show that! Even better, show a video that highlights the best features of it. If it’s too early in the process for that, at a minimum, create a slide show of what it is like to play the game. This is by far the best way to make them understand what you have in mind.

  • 他们 轻松推销:你很少向能够独立做出最终决定的人推销。通常,最好的情况是他们喜欢你展示给他们的东西,现在他们必须去说服他们的同事这是一个好主意。创建不言自明的推销材料,不需要您需要在房间里唱歌跳舞才能引人注目。向他们提供关键图片、简短视频和不言自明的项目符号列表,以便他们能够像您一样出色地推销产品。

  • Make it easy for them to pitch: Rarely are you pitching to someone who can independently make a final decision. Usually, the best case is that they love what you showed them and now they have to go convince their colleagues that it’s a good idea. Create pitch materials that speak for themselves, which don’t require you to be in the room giving a song and dance to be compelling. Arm them with key images, short videos, and self-explanatory bullet lists so that they can pitch it as well as you can.

推介技巧 #6:设计推介

Pitch Tip #6: Design the Pitch

推销是一种体验,对吧?你为什么不至少把它设计得和你的游戏一样好呢!本书中的许多镜头将帮助你做到这一点。你的推销应该通俗易懂、有惊喜、有好的兴趣曲线(一个钩子、一个构建、紧张和释放、一个高潮)等。它应该有好的美学设计,尽可能多地使用图像而不是文字。你的推销应该优雅,主要关注你的游戏的独特之处、为什么它会在竞争中取得成功,以及为什么它适合你的推销对象。只要有可能,你的推销就应该让人眼花缭乱。寻找一些可以用表演技巧打动他们的小方法。详细的动画、意想不到的音效、幽默的图像、实物道具以及你能想到的任何其他东西都可以帮助它成为一个伟大而令人难忘的推销。即使是你的场地也会有所不同:我曾经不得不向一位来纽约的出版商推销关于木乃伊的游戏。我安排好地点,让我们在大都会艺术博物馆的埃及馆进行宣传,那里有真正的木乃伊和坟墓。出版商被迷住了,我们得到了这个项目。如果你能让哪怕是一个简单的 PowerPoint 演示文稿充满表演天赋,他们就会相信你在制作游戏时也会做到这一点,甚至更多。

The pitch is an experience, right? Why wouldn’t you design it at least as well as your game! Lots of lenses from this book will help you do it. Your pitch should be accessible, have surprises, have a good interest curve (a hook, a build, tense and release, a climax), etc. It should have a good aesthetic design, favoring images over words whenever possible. Your pitch should be elegant, focusing primarily on what is unique about your game, why it will succeed against the competition, and why it is a good fit for the person you are pitching it to. And whenever possible, your pitch should dazzle. Look for little ways you can impress them with flourishes of showmanship. Detailed animations, unexpected sound effects, humorous images, physical props, and anything else you can think of can help make it a great and memorable pitch. Even your venue can make a difference: I once had to pitch game about mummies to a publisher who was visiting New York City. I made arrangements so that we could do the pitch in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in sight of actual mummies and tombs. The publisher was dazzled, and we got the project. If you can make even a simple PowerPoint presentation overflow with showmanship, it will give them confidence that you’ll do that and more when you make the game.

你应该仔细考虑整个推介过程中会发生的每个时刻。其他团队成员会到场吗?你什么时候介绍他们?你什么时候展示你的原型?如果你认为“过度计划”会破坏你的推介的活力,那你就错了。如果你愿意,你随时可以偏离计划,但制定计划会让你的头脑自由,专注于进行精彩的推介,你不必担心自己是否忘记了重要的事情。

You should think through every moment that will happen during the entire pitch encounter. Will you have other team members there? When will you introduce them? When will you show your prototype? If you think that “overplanning” will spoil the energy of your pitch, you are wrong. You can always deviate from a plan if you want to, but having a plan will keep your mind free to focus on giving a great pitch, and you won’t have to worry about whether you have forgotten something important.

推销技巧#7:了解所有细节

Pitch Tip #7: Know All the Details

在推介期间,你会被问到问题。经验丰富、忙碌的出版商也不会等到最后才问问题——他们会打断你精心策划的演讲,并就他们认为重要的内容提出详细问题。你需要掌握尽可能多的事实。这些事实包括:

During a pitch, you are going to get questions. Experienced, busy publishers aren’t going to wait until the end, either—they will break into your carefully planned presentation and ask detailed questions about the things they think are important. You need to have as many facts as possible at your fingertips. These include the following:

  • 设计细节:你应该对自己的设计了如指掌。对于你一直拖延的设计部分,你至少应该有个猜测。对于诸如“游戏时间有多少小时?”“完成一个关卡需要多长时间?”“多人游戏如何运作?”等问题,你应该有自信的答案。

  • Design details: You should know your design inside and out. For parts of the design you’ve been putting off, you should at least have a guess. You should have confident answers for questions like “How many hours of gameplay?” “How long does it take to finish a level?” “How does multiplayer work?”

  • 时间表详情:您需要知道制作游戏需要多长时间,以及您的团队大概需要多长时间才能达到每个重要里程碑(设计文档完成、第一个可玩原型、第一个 alpha 版、第二个 alpha 版、beta 版、发布日期、发布后更新频率)。确保这些时间是现实的,否则您的受众很快就会对您失去信心。准备好回答这个问题:“您最快什么时候能完成这个任务?” 您会被要求回答。

  • Schedule details: You need to know how long it will take to create the game and roughly how long it will take your team to get to each of the important milestones (design document completed, first playable prototype, first alpha, second alpha, beta, launch date, frequency of postlaunch updates). Make sure these times are realistic, or your audience will lose confidence in you fast. Be ready for the question: “What’s the fastest you could get this done?” Expect to be held to your answer.

  • 财务细节:您应该知道完成游戏需要花费多少。这意味着要知道有多少人会参与游戏开发、他们会花多长时间开发游戏以及其他成本。还要考虑这样一个问题:“这款游戏能赚多少钱?”您可能应该根据同类游戏的盈利情况来回答这个问题。不要只给出一个数字——给出一个您认为合理的范围。绝对要确保您给出的最低数字仍能让游戏成为一项有利可图的投资。

  • Financial details: You should know what it will cost to get the game done. This means knowing how many people will be working on the game, how long they’ll be working on it, and other costs. Also expect the question: “How much money will this make?” You should probably base that answer on how comparable titles have monetized. Don’t just give one number—give what you think is a reasonable range. Make ABSOLUTELY sure that the minimum number you give still makes the game a profitable venture.

  • 风险:您将被问及项目中最大的风险是什么。您需要准备好清晰简洁地陈述这些风险,以及管理每个风险的计划,无论是技术、游戏玩法、美学、营销、财务还是法律。

  • Risks: You will be asked what the biggest risks on the project are. You need to be ready to state them clearly and succinctly, along with your plan for managing each one of them whether they are technical, gameplay, aesthetic, marketing, financial, or legal.

你还需要预测你的推销对象会问什么问题。有一个关于幻想工程师乔·罗德的传说,他当时正在向迪士尼首席执行​​官迈克尔·艾斯纳做动物王国主题公园的最后推销。艾斯纳对这个公园是否是个好主意犹豫了很久,乔得到了最后一次机会来解释为什么这是个好主意。在乔的详细陈述之后,艾斯纳说:“对不起……我还是不明白活体动物有什么令人兴奋的地方。”乔走出会议室,一会儿又回来了,带着一只孟加拉虎走进房间。“这就是活体动物令人兴奋的地方,”他宣称。主题公园得到了资金。当你能预测接下来的问题并给出完美的答案时,你的说服力就会神奇地增强。

You also need to anticipate the questions that the people you are pitching to are going to ask. There is a legend about Imagineer Joe Rohde who was giving the final pitch of the Animal Kingdom theme park to Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Eisner had long wavered about whether this park was a good idea, and Joe was given his last chance to explain why it was. After Joe’s detailed presentation, Eisner said, “I’m sorry… I still don’t see what is so exciting about live animals.” Joe walked out of the meeting and returned, moments later, leading a Bengal tiger into the room. “This,” he declared, “is what is so exciting about live animals.” The theme park got its funding. When you can anticipate what questions are coming and give perfect answers, you can be magically persuasive.

推销技巧#8:展现自信

Pitch Tip #8: Exude Confidence

虽然热情很重要,但信心同样重要,而且两者完全不同。自信意味着你确信你的游戏对客户来说是完美的,你的团队是实现这一目标的完美团队。这意味着当你遇到一个棘手的问题时不会动摇。这意味着了解所有的细节。请记住,你不只是在推销这个想法,你也在推销自己。如果你看起来很紧张,这会让人们认为你不相信自己所说的话。当你展示一些令人印象深刻的东西时,你应该表现得像没什么大不了的,就像它很容易一样。如果你的其他团队成员和你在一起,你们应该作为一个团队回答问题,每个人都对其他人能最好地回答哪些问题充满信心。

While passion is important, confidence is just as important and not at all the same thing. Being confident means you are sure your game will be perfect for the client and that your team is the perfect team to pull it off. It means not getting shaken when you get a tough question. It means knowing all the details. Keep in mind, you aren’t just selling the idea, you are selling yourself. If you seem nervous, it’s going to make people think you don’t believe what you are saying. When you show something impressive, you should act like it was nothing, like it was easy. If your other team members are with you, you should answer questions as a team with each confident about which questions the others can answer best.

当一个棘手的问题试图动摇你的信心时,你可以使用一个神奇的词:“绝对”。对于诸如“你认为这会在欧洲畅销吗?”“服务器能处理负载吗?”“你能制作儿童版吗?”这样的问题,你可能会想“是”或“可能”,但我保证“绝对”听起来会更有信心。当然,你需要支持这个自信的答案!

And here is a magic word you can use when a tough question tries to shake your confidence: “Absolutely.” For questions like “Do you think this will sell in Europe?” “Can the servers handle the load?” “Can you make a kid’s version?” You might be thinking “yes” or “probably,” but I guarantee that “absolutely” will sound far more confident. Of course you need to back up that confident answer!

关于握手,我简单说一下:如果你不确定自己是否能自信地握手,你需要多加练习。握手是潜意识的秘密语言,是人们(尤其是男性)评估个性的一种方式。你的话语可能听起来很自信,但如果你的握手不够自信,那么你所说的一切都会让人怀疑。毕竟,如果你不能与某人同步握手,那么接下来的工作关系会如何发展呢?

And a quick word about handshakes: if you aren’t sure you have a confident handshake, you need to practice until you do. Handshakes are a secret language of the subconscious, a system by which people (especially men) assess personalities. Your words may sound confident, but if your handshake is not, it will cast doubt on everything you say. After all, if you can’t manage to be in sync with someone for two pumps and squeeze of the hand, how will the rest of the working relationship go?

但是如果你感觉不自信怎么办?如果你在一群人面前讲话时非常紧张怎么办?最好的办法是想象你非常自信的那一刻。把自己放在过去的那一刻会帮助你记住自信的感觉,你可以成为一个自信的人,冷静地掌控重要的情况。

But what if you don’t feel confident? What if you get really nervous talking in front of a group? The best thing to do is visualize a time when you were supremely confident. Putting yourself into that past moment will help you remember what confidence feels like and that you can be a confident person calmly in charge of an important situation.

推销技巧#9:保持灵活性

Pitch Tip #9: Be Flexible

在推销过程中,你会遇到各种意外情况。推销对象可能会突然表示讨厌你的概念——你还有什么别的吗?你可能计划开一个小时的会议,结果却被告知“我只有二十分钟”。你需要冷静而自信地处理这类事情。游戏设计师理查德·加菲尔德讲述了一个故事,讲述了他如何去一家出版商推销 RoboRally,这是一款关于工厂机器人的精致棋盘游戏。加菲尔德很喜欢他的游戏,并向游戏出版商进行了详细的推销,出版商耐心地听完后说:“很抱歉,我们不能用这个。它太大了。我们正在寻找小巧便携的游戏。有这样的游戏吗?”加菲尔德本可以走开,感到受辱,但他保持客观,认为他的目标是发布一款游戏——不一定是这款游戏。他提到他正在研究一种新型纸牌游戏的创意——他能回来介绍一下吗?他第二次推销的游戏最终成为了超级热门游戏《万智牌》。

During your pitch, you are going to get curveballs. The person you are pitching to might suddenly reveal they hate your concept—what else do you have? You might have planned on a one-hour meeting only to be told “I only have twenty minutes.” You need to handle these kinds of things with coolness and confidence. Game designer Richard Garfield tells a story about how he went to a publisher to pitch RoboRally, an elaborate board game about robots in a factory. Garfield loved his game and gave a detailed pitch to a game publisher who sat patiently through it and then said, “I’m sorry, but we can’t use this. It’s too big. We’re looking for games that are small and portable. Got anything like that?” Garfield could have walked out, insulted, but instead he stayed objective and considered that his goal was to get a game published—not necessarily this game. He mentioned that he was working on an idea for a new kind of card game—could he come back and present that? The game he pitched the second time eventually became the megahit Magic: The Gathering.

演讲技巧#10:排练

Pitch Tip #10: Rehearse

计划好你的推销计划是好的,但排练更好。你越能自如地谈论你的游戏,你的推销计划就会越自然。寻找任何练习的机会——当你妈妈问你“那么,你最近在做什么?”时,就向她推销。向你的同事、你的理发师或你的狗推销。这并不是说你需要记住你的推销词的具体措辞,而是一系列的想法需要能够像一首你最喜欢的歌曲一样自然地从你心中涌现出来。

Planning your pitch is good; rehearsing it is better. The more you get comfortable talking about your game, the more natural your pitch will be. Look for any opportunity to practice—when your mother asks, “So, what have you been working on?” give her the pitch. Give it to your coworkers, to your hairdresser, or to your dog. It isn’t that the specific words of your pitch need to be memorized, but the chain of ideas needs to be able to spring forth naturally from you, like a favorite song.

如果你要展示演示,也要排练一下。无论如何都要避免边玩边推销!这会让人觉得你智力低下,浪费宝贵的时间。让同事在你谈论和回答问题的时候玩游戏。除非他们对此很兴奋,否则不要指望高管们会玩你的原型。他们太容易出丑或破坏你的原型并让你难堪了。

If you are going to show a demo, rehearse that, too. Avoid, at all costs, pitching while you play! It makes you sound mentally deficient and wastes valuable time. Have a colleague play the game while you talk about it and answer questions. Unless they are excited about it, don’t expect executives to play your prototype. There is too much danger of them embarrassing themselves or crashing your prototype and embarrassing you.

推销技巧#11:让他们拥有它

Pitch Tip #11: Get Them to Own It

第 30 章客户中,我们了解了米开朗基罗让客户拥有项目的聪明方法。但你不必如此鬼鬼祟祟。理想情况下,你希望他们在听完你的推介后,认为这个游戏是“他们的游戏”。在你推介的团队中有一个内部拥护者确实很有帮助——这个人预先就被这个概念所吸引,并会向其他人捍卫它。另一种提高他们拥有所有权的可能性的方法是将客户的想法融入到推介中。如果在之前与他们的谈话中,他们说“所以,这是一个战争游戏,是吧?它有直升机吗?我喜欢直升机!”你应该非常确定你的推介中的某个地方有直升机。你甚至可以即时整合客户的想法,使用他们早期问题中的概念(“它会有大老鼠吗?”)来解释推介后期的事情(“那么,假设你来到一个满是大老鼠的房间……”)。你越容易让他们想象这是他们的游戏,他们就越接近接受你的提议。

In Chapter 30: Client, we heard Michelangelo’s clever method of getting a client to own the project. But you don’t have to be so sneaky. Ideally, you want them to come away from your pitch thinking of the game as “their game.” Having an inside advocate in the group you are pitching to really helps—someone who is presold on the concept and who will defend it to the others. Another way to improve the chances of them taking ownership is to integrate the ideas of the client into the pitch. If, in a previous conversation with them, they said “So, it’s a war game, huh? Does it have helicopters? I love helicopters!” you should be darn sure there are helicopters in your pitch somewhere. You can even integrate the client’s ideas on the fly, using concepts from their early questions (“Could it have giant rats?”) to explain things later in the pitch (“So, say you come upon a room full of giant rats…”). The easier you make it for them to imagine that it is their game, the closer they will be to accepting your proposal.

推销技巧#12:跟进

Pitch Tip #12: Follow Up

在你推销之后,他们会感谢你并承诺会回复你。他们可能会回复,但也可能不会回复。这并不意味着他们不喜欢你的推销。他们可能非常喜欢你的推销,但被其他更紧迫的紧急情况所困扰。在推销后的几天内,你应该找个借口通过电子邮件跟进他们(“你问过纹理管理器的详细信息,我只是想就此事回复你”),巧妙地提醒他们你还在,他们应该给你反馈。你没有理由直接催促他们给出答案——如果你这样做,你很可能很快得到一个答案:“不用了。”他们可能需要时间考虑,需要时间进行内部讨论,或者需要时间审查其他竞争提案。只要定期跟进,不要太频繁,直到你得到答案。如果他们没有回复,不要沮丧——要有耐心和理解。也许你的想法还没有发挥作用。在宣传六个月后联系出版商并收到回复的情况并不罕见,“嘿,我很高兴你联系我。还记得你做过的宣传吗?我想我们可能想和你谈谈。我们下周可以见面吗?”

After your pitch, they will thank you and promise to get back to you. And they might—but they might just as easily not. This doesn’t mean that they didn’t like your pitch. They might have liked it very much but gotten swept up in some other, more pressing emergency. Within a few days of the pitch, you should find an excuse to follow up with them by email (“you had asked about details of the texture manager, and I just wanted to get back to you on that”) to subtly remind them that you are still around and that they owe you feedback. You have no good reason to nag them outright for an answer—if you do, you are likely to get an answer quickly: “no thanks.” They may need time to think about it, time to discuss internally, or time to review other competing proposals. Just keep following up periodically, not too often, until you get an answer. Never get frustrated if they don’t respond—be patient and understanding. It may be that the time for your idea to be useful just isn’t here yet. It is not uncommon to ping a publisher six months after a pitch and to hear back, “Hey, I’m glad you contacted me. Remember that pitch you gave? I think we might want to talk to you about it. Can we meet next week?”

嘿,Kickstarter 怎么样?

Hey, What about Kickstarter?

啊,众包。这似乎是完美的解决方案!为什么你必须向某些高管推销,而你可以直接将游戏带给人们,甚至在制作之前就将其出售给他们!一些设计师已经通过这种方式筹集了数百万美元,你为什么不呢?

Ah, crowdsourcing. It seems like the perfect solution! Why should you have to pitch to some executive, when you can take your game right to the people and sell it to them before you even make it! Some designers have raised millions of dollars this way, why not you?

Kickstarter 及其众多同类平台对一些游戏开发者来说无疑是件好事,但大多数尝试众筹的游戏开发者都失败了。为什么?他们中的许多人没有遵循上述的宣传技巧——所有关于直奔主题、看起来井然有序、抓住想象力、展示而不是讲述以及让观众眼花缭乱的规则在视频宣传中和在现场宣传中一样适用。但人们也不知道众筹的一些非常具体的事情:

Kickstarter and its many cousins have certainly been a wonderful thing for some game developers, but most game developers who try to crowdfund fail. Why? Many of them fail to follow the aforementioned pitch tips—all the rules about getting right to the point, seeming organized, capturing the imagination, showing instead of telling, and dazzling the viewer are just as true in a video pitch as they are when you pitch in person. But there are some very specific things that people don’t realize about crowdfunding as well:

  • 工作量很大:准备和开展众筹活动是一项艰巨的工作。预计需要花一个月的时间来设计和制作页面和视频,一个月的时间来开展活动,然后一个月后兑现你承诺的一切(邮寄 T 恤、制作自定义内容等)。你本来可以花两三个月的时间来制作游戏,但你甚至可能拿不到钱。

  • It’s a lot of work: Preparing and running a crowdfunding campaign is a huge amount of work. Expect to take a full month to design and build your page and video, a full month to run the campaign, and then a full month later down the road to fulfill everything you promised (mailing t-shirts, making custom content, etc.). That’s two or three months you could have spent making your game, and you might not even get the money.

  • 这实际上是一种预订系统:众筹不是一种投资系统,也不是慈善系统。大多数为某事提供资金的人之所以这样做,是因为他们很高兴能得到一些特别的东西,比其他人先得到它,而且价格还很便宜。如果你发明了下一代游戏控制器,那就太好了。但如果你打算为你的免费 iOS 游戏进行众筹,那么就要当心了。苹果(目前)没有分发早期版本的手段,如果游戏已经免费,为什么有人会在还没确定自己是否喜欢它之前就给你 25 美元呢?众筹最适合有实体组件的东西,或者有高昂固定价格(20 美元以上)的游戏。

  • It’s really a preorder system: Crowdfunding is not a system of investment, and it is not a charity system. Most people who fund something are doing so because they are excited about getting something special, getting it before everyone else, and getting it at a good price. That’s great if you have invented, say, a next-generation game controller. But if you plan to crowdfund your free-to-play iOS game, then watch out. Apple (presently) has no means for distributing early versions, and if the game is already free, why would anyone give you $25 before they even know if they like it? Crowdfunding works best with things that have a physical component or with games that have a high ($20+) fixed price.

  • 要求尽可能少:您可能认为,通过要求更多资金,它将激励社区为您提供更多资金。事实似乎并非如此。而且在 Kickstarter 上,如果您没有达到目标,您将一无所获。设定您可以管理的最低资金目标。如果您的活动取得成功,您总是可以获得更多。

  • Ask for as little as possible: You might think that by asking for more funding, it will incentivize the community to give you more. This does not seem to be the case. And with Kickstarter, if you don’t hit your target, you get nothing. Set the lowest funding target you can manage. If your campaign takes off, you can always get more.

  • 越短越好:60 天的资金听起来比 30 天要多,对吧?在大多数情况下,不是。较短的竞选活动似乎效果更好。大多数竞选活动发现,他们在第一周(来自确定要资助的人)和最后一周(来自喜欢等到最后一分钟才做决定的人)获得了大部分资金。中间有两周还是六周似乎并不重要,但您的竞选活动越长,工作量就越大,人们忘记它的可能性就越大。

  • Shorter is better: Sixty days of money sounds like more than thirty days, right? In most cases, no. Shorter campaigns seem to do better. Most campaigns find that they get most of the funding the first week (from people who are sure they want to fund it) and the last week (from people who prefer to wait till the last minute to decide). Whether you have two weeks in the middle or six weeks doesn’t seem to matter much, but the longer your campaign, the more work it will be, and the more chance there is people will forget about it.

  • 奖励要简单:记住,这是预购。大多数人只是想要以优惠的价格提前购买游戏。T 恤和其他小玩意儿是个不错的主意但这不会对你的资金产生太大影响,邮寄工作会很繁琐,甚至可能会让资助者因选择太多而不知所措。

  • Keep the rewards simple: Remember, it’s a preorder. Most just want an early release of the game at a good price. T-shirts and other tchotchkes are a nice idea but won’t change your funding very much, will be a lot of work to mail out, and may even overwhelm funders with too many choices.

  • 展示,而不是讲述:最成功的游戏众筹视频展示了游戏的实况,仅此而已。为什么?因为众筹实际上主要是预订。向他们展示一款很酷的游戏的一部分,人们就会购买它。如果你花五分钟时间谈论这款游戏可能是什么样子,那你就很难了。

  • Show, don’t tell: The most successful game crowdfunding videos show a taste of the game in action, and not much more. Why? Because crowdfunding is really mostly about preorders. Show them a slice of a cool game, and people will step up to buy it. Yap for five minutes about what the game might be, you’ll have a much harder time.

  • 努力:尽你所能宣传你的众筹活动。尽可能频繁地发推文并更新信息。设定小目标“嘿,我们快完成了 10%!你可以成为那个让我们完成 10% 的人!”请你帮助宣传活动的任何有影响力的人。不要以为你可以坐视不管,让活动自行发展——你必须每分每秒都在努力。

  • Hustle: Do anything you can to get the word out about your crowdfunding campaign. Tweet and give updates as often as possible. Set tiny goals “Hey, we’re almost 10% there! You could be the one to get us to 10%!” Bother any influential people you help the word out. Don’t think you can sit back and let the campaign take care of itself—you have to be pushing it every second.

  • 设定延伸目标:延伸目标(我们的目标是 4 万美元,但如果达到 5 万美元,我们将添加蓝色激光水平仪!)对病毒式传播有很大帮助,因为现在资助你游戏的每个人都有理由传播这个消息 - 毕竟,如果我能让其他人承诺捐款,那么我就能从我承诺的钱中获得更多,而且对我来说没有任何成本。

  • Have stretch goals: Stretch goals (Our goal is $40K, but if we hit $50K, we’ll add a blue laser level!) help a great deal with virality, because everyone who funded your game now has a reason to spread the word—after all, if I can get other people to pledge money, then I’ll get more for the money I pledged, at no cost to me.

  • 出名:这是毫无疑问的。最有可能获得资助的游戏是那些已经有粉丝的人开发的游戏。如果你不出名,你的游戏最好听起来很精彩,或者有一个很小的资助目标。

  • Be famous: There are no two ways about it. The most likely games to get funded are the ones by people who already have a following. If you aren’t famous, your game better be pretty incredible sounding or have a tiny funding goal.

简而言之,众筹对于某些游戏来说是个不错的选择,但对于其他游戏来说则不然。归根结底,众筹和其他宣传一样,需要时间和精力才能成功。每个游戏都是从一个想法开始的,但资金来自一个宣传。保持这种心态,这样你就不会忘记在设计游戏的同时还要设计宣传。

In short, crowdfunding is a great move for some games, but not for others. In the end, it’s a pitch like any other and needs time and attention to be great. Every game begins with an idea, but it gets funded with a pitch. Keep this lens so you don’t forget to design your pitch as well as you design your game.

如果你向高管推销,对他们来说最重要的事情就是这款游戏能否赚钱,以及能赚多少钱。这是我们下一章的主题。

If you are pitching to an executive, the most important thing to them will be whether the game can make money, and how much. This is the subject of our next chapter.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

第三十二

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

设计师和客户希望游戏能够盈利

The Designer and Client Want the Game to Make a Profit



32.1

FIGURE

32.1

爱情与金钱

Love and Money

现在是时候面对另一个痛苦的事实了。

It is time to face another painful truth.

我知道你个人是出于对游戏的热爱而设计游戏的。如果游戏设计无法赚钱,你肯定会继续把它当成一种爱好。“业余”这个词的字面意思是爱好者。

I know that you, personally, are designing games out of love for the medium. If there were no way to make money at game design, you would surely continue to do it as a hobby. The very word “amateur” literally means lover.

但金钱却是推动游戏产业发展的燃料。

But money is the fuel that drives the game industry.

如果游戏不赚钱,这个行业就会枯萎并消亡。

If games were not profitable, the industry would wither and die.

而在现实世界的游戏行业中,许多人如果今天了解到,通过销售开罐器而不是游戏,他们每年可以多赚取 2% 的利润,他们就会这样做,并且为他们的选择感到自豪。

And in the real world of the game industry, there are many people who, if they learned today they could make 2% more profit a year selling can openers instead of games, would do so and feel really proud of their choice.

也许你会对这些人有些鄙视。但你应该这样吗?利润对这个行业来说是必需的——除了那些爱钱的人,还有谁更适合掌管利润呢?我的意思是,你不想整天担心钱,对吧?你要设计游戏。为什么不让赚钱的人掌管钱,让设计的人掌管设计,这样每个人都会很高兴,对吧?

Perhaps you view these people with a certain contempt. But should you? Profits are necessary to the industry—who better to be in charge of them than people who love money? I mean, you don’t want to worry about money all day, do you? You have games to design. Why not let the money people be in charge of the money and the design people be in charge of the design, and everyone will be happy, right?

很遗憾,不是。还记得“形式追随资金”吗?投资人做出的决定(“你需要用 20 万美元来制作这款游戏​​,而不是你要求的 45 万美元”;“我们决定这款游戏需要有微交易,而不是订阅”;“你必须加入游戏内广告”)会对游戏设计产生巨大影响。相反的情况也是如此——游戏设计决策将对盈利能力产生巨大影响。奇怪的是,设计和管理各自掌握着控制对方命运的权力。正因为如此,投资人会介入并告诉你如何设计你的游戏,因为他们担心你可能不了解你的设计对盈利能力的影响。当你们两个之间发生冲突时,你认为谁会赢?记住黄金法则:有金子的人制定规则。

Sadly, no. Remember “form follows funding?” Decisions that the money people make (“you need to make this game with $200K, not the $450K you asked for”; “we’ve decided this game needs to have microtransactions, not a subscription”; “you have to include in-game advertising”) can have a tremendous impact on the game design. And the opposite is true—game design decisions will have an enormous impact on profitability. In a weird way, design and management each hold the strings controlling the destiny of the other. Because of this, the money people are going to step in and tell you how to design your game, because they are afraid you might not understand the impacts of your design on profitability. And when there is a conflict between the two of you, who do you think is going to win? Keep in mind the golden rule: the one with the gold makes the rules.

因此,充分了解游戏业务非常重要,这样你才能与投资人进行明智的讨论。这将赋予你更多的创意控制权,因为如果你能用他们能理解和相信的方式解释为什么你的宝贵功能能赚更多的钱,你就更有可能让游戏以你认为最好的方式呈现。

For this reason, it’s really important that you understand enough about the business of games so that you can have an intelligent discussion with the money people. This will give you much more creative control, because if you can explain why your precious feature will make more money, in terms they’ll understand and believe, you’ve got a much better shot at having the game turn out the way you know is best.

你可能会想,“我对商业一窍不通——所有这些财务方面的东西我都不懂。”但作为一名游戏设计师,你已经对心理学有了一定的了解,而每一个商业决策实际上都只是对人类心理本质的赌注。你不必掌握每一个财务细节——你只需要对游戏业务有足够的了解,就可以思考和谈论它。这当然比学习概率要简单,而你似乎对这一点理解得很好。我敢肯定你遇到过一个拥有 MBA 学位的人,令人惊讶的是,他似乎不太聪明。如果那个人能理解,你也能。赚钱就像一场游戏——当你从这个角度考虑它时,思考它实际上会很有趣。

You might be thinking, “I don’t know the first thing about business—all this financial stuff is going to be over my head.” But as a game designer, you already know a lot about psychology, and every business decision is really just a bet on the nature of human psychology. You don’t have to master every financial detail—you just need to know enough about the game business to think about it and talk about it. It’s certainly simpler than learning about probability, and you seemed to understand that pretty well. I’m sure you’ve met someone with an MBA who, surprisingly, didn’t seem too bright. If that guy can understand it, so can you. And making money is a lot like a game—when you consider it from that point of view, it can actually be kind of fun to think about.

本章不会详细介绍游戏业务——其他书籍也有这方面的介绍。但我们将讨论您可以采取哪些措施,以便更轻松地与掌握游戏资金的人进行有意义的对话。

This chapter isn’t going to get into great detail about the business of games—there are other books for that. But we’ll talk about things you can do to make it easier to have meaningful conversations with the people who hold the purse strings on your game.

了解你的商业模式

Know Your Business Model

赚钱是艺术,工作是艺术,做好生意是最好的艺术。

-安迪·沃霍尔

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

—Andy Warhol

零售

Retail

要了解任何业务,就必须关注资金。如果你了解资金流向何处以及流向何处,你就了解了业务。例如,当消费者购买一款价值 50 美元的零售游戏时,此图显示了资金的平均流向:

To understand any business, follow the money. If you understand where the money goes and why, you understand the business. For example, when a consumer buys a $50 retail game title, this diagram shows, on average, where the money ends up:



32.2

FIGURE

32.2

看到这种图表,你可能会产生如下疑问:

Seeing this kind of diagram leads to questions like the following:

问:什么是平台持有者?

Q: What is a platform holder?

答:这是制造特定游戏机的公司(索尼、任天堂、微软)。他们通常不会通过销售游戏机赚钱(他们经常亏本,以低于成本的价格出售!)。他们通过向发行商“征税”来赚钱。

A: This is the company that makes a given console (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft). They don’t usually make any money selling the consoles (they often lose money, selling them below cost!). They make their money by “taxing” the publisher for each title made.

问:零售商为什么拿走这么多?

Q: Why does the retailer take so much?

答:零售商看起来不是很贪婪吗?但其实他们不是。零售业利润很低,他们必须想尽一切办法才能生存。经营一家商店的成本很高。

A: Doesn’t the retailer seem greedy? But they aren’t. Retail is a low-margin business where they have to cut every possible corner to survive. It just costs a lot to run a store.

问:出版商为什么要收取这么多钱?

Q: Why does the publisher take so much?

答:看看他们要做的所有事情!他们必须与所有这些不同的公司协调和讨价还价,如果出了问题,他们就是亏损方。如果游戏卖不出去,开发商仍然会得到制作游戏的报酬,零售商会让出版商回购未售出的游戏。出版商收取如此多费用的部分原因是他们必须为亏损的游戏付费。

A: Look at everything they have to do! They have to coordinate and bargain with all these different companies, and if anything goes wrong, they are the ones who lose money. If the game doesn’t sell, the developer still got paid to make the title, and the retailer will make the publisher buy back the unsold titles. Part of the reason the publisher takes so much is because they have to pay for titles that lose money.

问:什么是减价储备?

Q: What is a markdown reserve?

答:最终,书本会降价出售。当这种情况发生时,零售商会让出版商承担部分损失。平均而言,每本书的损失约为 3 美元。

A: Eventually, the title will be marked down, sold at a lower price. The retailer makes the publisher absorb some of the loss when this happens. On average, that comes to about $3 a unit.

现在,请记住,这些数字是平均值。实际情况要详细得多,并且可能因情况而异。但仍然如此!看看玩家的 50 美元中有多少花在了与实际制作游戏无关的事情上!当可以直接向消费​​者销售时,您可以看到为什么开发人员如此兴奋。当然,这将是双赢,对吧?消费者支付更少,开发人员获得更多!好吧,让我们来看看。

Now, keep in mind, these numbers are averages. What really happens is much more detailed and can vary from one situation to another. But still! Look how much of the player’s $50 go to things that have nothing to do with actually making the game! You can see why developers were so excited when it became possible to sell directly to the consumer. Surely, it will be a win/win, right? The consumer pays less, and the developer gets more! Well, let’s take a look.

直接下载

Direct Download



32.3

FIGURE

32.3

好了,这更像了!这个简单的模型省去了出版商、零售商、平台持有者,甚至光盘制造商。这就是模型Steam 和苹果应用商店使用的差不多。简洁明了!消费者只需支付低价,比如 10 美元,开发者通常可以收取其中的 70%。但是,嘿……

There we go, that’s more like it! This simple model cuts out the publisher, and the retailer, the platform holder, and even the disk manufacturer. This is the model (more or less) that Steam and the Apple app store use. Clean and simple! The consumer pays a low price, say, $10, and the developer generally collects 70% of that. But, hey…

问:7 美元旁边的问号是什么?

答:嗯,这是因为该图假设开发商在营销和广告上花费为零。有时确实如此,但通常并非如此。通常,需要花费一些钱才能让人们了解游戏。这曾经是出版商的问题,但如果你自行出版,那么现在就是你的问题了。回头看图32.2,出版商平均每位客户花费 6 美元;如果你在这里这样做,你只剩下 1 美元!决定花多少钱来吸引客户是自行出版最具挑战性的方面之一,因为没有任何保证,你必须小心不要花的钱超过游戏的收入。

Q: What’s that question mark next to the $7?

A: Well, that’s because this diagram assumes the developer spends zero on marketing and advertising. Which is sometimes the case, but not usually. Usually, some amount of money needs to be spent to get people to find out about the game. This used to be the publisher’s problem, but if you are self-publishing, well, it’s your problem now. Look back to Figure 32.2, where the publisher was spending $6 per customer, on average; if you do that here, you only are left with $1! Trying to decide how much to spend to acquire customers is one of the most challenging aspects of self-publishing, because there are no guarantees, and you must be careful not to spend more than the game takes in.

免费玩

Free-to-Play



32.4

FIGURE

32.4

直接下载游戏出现后不久,价格就开始下降,原因我们稍后会谈到。最终,价格一路降至零,因为开发者意识到吸引最多玩家的方法是免费赠送游戏,等到玩家需要某些东西时再向他们收费。从某种程度上讲,这对玩家来说似乎很棒(他们可以免费试玩游戏,看看自己是否喜欢),但另一方面,玩家经常会觉得游戏设计师故意设计游戏情境,诱使玩家在关键时刻想要付费。玩家之所以有这种感觉,是因为这是真的!喜欢还是讨厌,这就是免费游戏 (F2P) 的运作方式。而且它确实有效,耗资数百万美元。让我们看看图表。

Shortly after direct download games appeared, prices started to drop, for reasons we’ll get into later. Eventually, they dropped all the way to zero, as developers realized that the way to get the most players was to give the game away for free, wait till players needed something, and then charge them for it. On one level, this seems great for players (they get to try the game for free to see if they like it), but on the other hand, players often feel like the game designer is intentionally designing game situations that lure the player into wanting to pay at key moments. Players feel this way because it’s true! Love it or hate it, that’s the way free-to-play (F2P) works. And it does work, to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. So let’s check out the diagram.

问:平均 LTV 是多少?

答:LTV 代表终身价值。即平均玩家在整个游戏过程中支付的费用。对于免费游戏,许多玩家不会支付任何费用。但有些玩家会支付很多费用。每位玩家花费的平均金额就是平均 LTV。不同游戏的 LTV 差别很大,所以不要太在意这 5 美元。

问:什么是客户获取?

答:这就是我们衡量吸引玩家玩你的游戏平均成本的方法。再说一遍,3 美元只是一个例子。对于病毒式传播的游戏,成本可能更低。但对于某些游戏,成本会更高。

问:五毛钱的利润?我不需要很多顾客吗?

答:是的……没错。如果你的游戏制作成本为 50 万美元(一款普通手机游戏的典型预算),那么你需要 100 万玩家才能实现收支平衡。你可以看出为什么提高 LTV 和降低客户获取成本如此重要。

Q: What is average LTV?

A: LTV stands for lifetime value. That is, how much the average player pays over their entire play history. With F2P games, lots of players will pay zero. But some will pay a lot. The average amount spent per player is the average LTV. LTV varies widely from game to game, so don’t take this $5 amount very seriously.

Q: What is customer acquisition?

A: That’s the way we measure what it costs, on average, to get someone to play your game. Again, $3 is just an example. With a very viral game, it might cost less. With some games, it costs more.

Q: Fifty cents profit? Aren’t I going to need a lot of customers?

A: Yes… yes you are. If your game cost $500K to make (a typical budget for a modest mobile game), you’ll need a million players at these costs just to break even. You can see why increasing the LTV and decreasing the customer acquisition costs are so very important.

我相信你对此还有更多疑问——追随金钱就是如此——它会引发问题——找到答案,你就会理解这种商业模式。当然,还有其他商业模式——订阅、棋盘和纸牌游戏、广告游戏、购买玩具时赋予你额外能力的游戏等等。每种商业模式的特点都发挥着强大的力量,有助于定义通过它们销售的游戏的性质,这就是你需要了解它们的原因。其实这并不难。如果你发现自己对一种新的商业模式感到困惑,你所要做的就是找一个理财专家,问他们“嘿,你能告诉我钱都花到哪里去了吗?”很快你就会知道该问什么问题了。

I’m sure you have many more questions about this—following the money does that—it raises questions—find the answers, and you’ll understand the business model. There are other business models, of course—subscriptions, board and card games, advergames, games that give you extra powers when you buy toys, and many more. And the peculiarities of each business model exert powerful forces that help define the nature of the games sold through them, which is why you need to understand them. It isn’t hard, really. If you find yourself baffled by a new business model, all you have to do is find a money person and ask them “Hey, can you show me where the money goes?” and pretty soon you’ll know just what questions to ask.

了解你的竞争对手

Know Your Competition

当你将游戏推向世界时,它实际上并不是直接面向消费者。首先,它必须与数十款其他游戏竞争,以赢得潜在玩家的青睐。如果你了解你的游戏的竞争对手,这将大有帮助,因为这与游戏本身的优秀程度同样重要。你的游戏是唯一一款僵尸宠物养殖模拟游戏,还是有数十款这样的游戏?与其他游戏相比,你的游戏看起来如何?你是同类中的最佳游戏还是低成本的替代品?希望你的游戏能够填补你在市场上发现的空白——人们真正想要但尚未出现的东西。如果你能向投资者展示你已经进行了彻底的“差距分析”,通过查看与你的游戏相近但缺少你提供的关键组件的游戏,这将极大地帮助你。

When you send your game out into the world, it doesn’t really go straight to consumers. First, it must battle with dozens of other games to win the hearts and minds of potential players. It helps a great deal if you know something about what your game is competing with, for that can be as important as how good it is. Is your game the only zombie-pet-farming sim out there, or are there dozens? How does your game look compared to the others? Are you the best-in-breed or the low-budget alternative? Hopefully, your game is filling a gap that you have perceived in the market—something that people will really want, that isn’t already out there. If you can show the money people that you have done a thorough “gap analysis” by looking at games that are close to yours but that are missing a key component that you will provide, it will help your case immensely.

了解你的受众

Know Your Audience

早在第 9 章玩家中,我们讨论了了解你的受众的重要性,这样你才能为他们制作出出色的游戏。但你不仅需要了解你的受众如何玩游戏,还需要了解你的受众如何付费。什么样的价格对他们来说才是公平的?他们对免费游戏有什么看法?高价游戏会让他们望而却步,还是他们认为这是一款有价值的游戏?哪些功能会让他们决定购买游戏?你对这些问题的回答可能比其他任何问题都更能影响你的游戏,所以你需要有可靠的答案。在这里使用你的设计师权力来看看钱人们看不到的东西。有时,他们只能看到图表和表格。如果你能看透玩家的内心,并想出一个你确信他们会认为公平的新定价模型,那么你将能够比一百名金融分析师对游戏盈利能力产生更大的影响。

Way back in Chapter 9: Player, we talked about the importance of knowing your audience so you can make them a great game. But you need to understand not just how your audience plays, but how your audience pays. What price point is going to seem fair to them? How do they feel about free to play? Is a high-priced game a turnoff for them, or do they see that as a valuable game? What features make them decide to buy a game? Your answers to these questions may shape your game more than anything else, so you need have solid answers. Use your designer powers here to see what the money people can’t. Sometimes, all they can see are charts and tables. If you can see into the heart and mind of your player and come up with a new pricing model you are sure they will find fair, you will be able to have more impact on the profitability of a game than a hundred financial analysts.

以游戏《龙与地下城》为例。设计师最初制作的是一款订阅游戏,但随着该模式开始减弱,他们决定将其转换为免费游戏。许多玩家不喜欢免费冒险游戏——感觉就像在作弊。就好像游戏说,“嘿……杀不死龙,是吧?好吧,给我 5 美元买这把魔法战斧,我打赌你能做到。”所以,你羞怯地付了钱,得到了魔法战斧,杀死了龙,然后,感觉有点失败。但想想《龙与地下城》的设计师是如何做到的:他们不要求你为武器付费;他们要求你为冒险付费。他们的游戏感觉不同,就好像在说,“你想去龙穴吗?那个冒险花费 5 美元。”所以,你付了钱,经过多次尝试和许多困难,最终杀死了龙。在他的宝藏堆上,猜猜是什么?有一把魔法战斧。在这两款游戏中,你都花了 5 美元,最后得到了一件神奇的武器,但在其中一款游戏中,你觉得自己像个骗子,而在另一款游戏中,你觉得自己像个英雄。这一切都是因为有人了解玩家的心理。

Consider the game Dungeons & Dragons Online. The designers originally made a subscription game, but as that model started to weaken, they decided to switch it to F2P. Many players dislike F2P adventure games—it can feel like you are cheating. It is as if the game says, “Hey… can’t kill the dragon, huh? Well, pay me $5 for this magic battle axe, and I bet you can do it.” So, you sheepishly pay the money, get the magic battle axe, kill the dragon, and, well, feel kind of like a failure. But consider how the designers of Dungeons & Dragons Online did it: they don’t ask you to pay for weapons; they ask you to pay for adventures. Their game feels-different, as if it says, “Would you like to go into the Dragon’s Cave? That adventure costs $5.” So, you pay for it and, with many tries and much difficulty, eventually slay the dragon. And on his treasure heap, guess what? There’s a magic battle axe. In both games, you paid $5 and ended up with a magic weapon, but in one, you feel like a cheat, and in the other, you feel like a hero. And all because someone understood the psychology of their player.

一个重要的考虑因素是您正在制作的是“硬核”游戏还是“休闲”游戏。老实说,有时很难区分这两个类别,因为有些人只是偶尔玩一个小时的《黑暗之魂》 ,而其他人则每周玩 80 个小时的硬核《Farmville》。但我们使用这些术语的意思是玩家是否将自己视为“游戏玩家”。如果他们是,他们往往愿意为对他们意义重大的内容支付高价。如果他们不这样自我认同,这并不意味着他们从不玩游戏——他们可能会每周玩几次《愤怒的小鸟》《地铁跑酷》,但只是为了消磨时间。那么,最重要的区别是什么?他们愿意支付多少钱。世界上可能每 100 个休闲玩家对应一个硬核游戏玩家,但硬核游戏玩家愿意为他们关心的游戏支付更多。这两个市场完全有效,但必须以完全不同的方式对待它们。全球有数十亿人组成的休闲市场听起来很有吸引力,但要吸引休闲玩家的注意力却非常困难,除非你运气好,突然变得流行起来(例如Flappy Bird)。另一方面,铁杆玩家对精心制作且有深度的游戏反应良好。为他们制作游戏的成本可能更高,但他们往往也愿意支付更多。无论你做出什么决定,关键是要知道谁会关注你的游戏,他们会为此付多少钱,以及为什么。

One significant consideration is whether you are making a “hardcore” or “casual” game. Honestly, it can be hard to draw a distinction between these categories, sometimes, as some people play Dark Souls casually, just for an hour once in a while, and others play eighty hours of hardcore Farmville a week. But what we mean when we use these terms is whether a player self-identifies as a “gamer.” If they do, they are often willing to pay a high price for content that means a lot to them. If they don’t self-identify this way, it doesn’t mean they never play games—they might play Angry Birds or Subway Surfer several times a week, but only to kill time. So, what’s the difference that matters most? How much they are willing to pay. There are probably a hundred casual players in the world for every hardcore gamer, but hardcore gamers are willing to pay a lot more for games they care about. Both markets are totally valid, but they must be approached quite differently. The casual market, consisting of billions of people worldwide, can sound very appealing, but it can be very hard to get the attention of casual gamers, unless you get lucky and become suddenly fashionable (see Flappy Bird). Hardcore gamers, on the other hand, respond well to something that is well-crafted and deep. It can cost more to make games for them, but they are often willing to pay more as well. Whatever you decide, the key is to know who will care about your game, what they will pay for it, and why.

学习语言

Learn the Language

每种商业模式都有自己独特的术语,可以作为游戏如何赚钱的简写。如果你想让赚钱的人认真对待你,那就学习他们的语言。如果你能说得和他们一样好,他们就会为你腾出一席之地。学会比他们说得更好,你会发现他们每次都会听从你的设计决定。以下是一些你应该知道的术语。

Every business model has its own unique jargon that serves as shorthand for talking about how the game makes money. If you want the money people to take you seriously, learn their language. If you can speak it as well as they do, they will make a place for you at the table. Learn to speak it better than they do, and you will find them deferring to your design decisions every time. Here are some terms you should know.

一般游戏业务条款

General Game Business Terms

  • SKU:发音为“skew”。代表“库存单位”。它表示商店的唯一库存商品。一款游戏可能会发布多个 SKU,因为每个不同的主机版本都是一个 SKU,每个语言版本(法语版 Halo 3)都是一个 SKU。发行商通常以一年内发布的 SKU 数量来衡量自己。

  • SKU: Pronounced “skew.” Stands for “stock keeping unit.” It means a unique inventory item for a store. One game might come out as many SKUs, since each different console release is a SKU and each language version (Halo 3 in French) is a SKU. Publishers often measure themselves in terms of how many SKUs they put out in a year.

  • COGS:不,不像机器里的齿轮。这是销售成本。也就是说,实际制作游戏每单位的成本是多少。

  • COGS: No, not like cogs in a machine. This is cost of goods sold. That is, what does it cost, per unit, to actually make the game.

  • 烧钱率:维持工作室运营每月需要花费多少钱?工资、福利、租金等。

  • Burn rate: What does it is cost, per month, to keep your studio open? Salaries, benefits, rent, etc.

  • 销售量与销售量:零售商从发行商处购买游戏时,游戏被“销售量”,即销售到商店。但是,当客户购买游戏时,我们称其为“销售量”。由于发行商必须回购零售商无法销售的游戏,因此销售量和销售量的游戏数量可能会有很大差异。如果一个爱吹牛的发行商向你吹嘘某款游戏已经售出 150 万份,而这款游戏才刚刚推出一周,你通常可以通过问“销售量还是销售量?”来戳破他的幻想。归根结底,只有“销售量”才是最重要的。

  • Sold in vs. sold through: When the retailer buys games from the publisher, they are “sold in,” that is, sold into the store. But when a customer buys the game, then we say it is “sold through.” Since the publisher has to buy back titles the retailer can’t sell, the number of sold-in and sold-through titles might be very different. If a boastful publisher brags to you that a title has sold 1.5 million copies, and it’s just been out for a week, you can often burst his bubble by asking “sold in or sold through?” In the end, only “sold through” matters.

  • 销售量:对于零售和直接下载游戏来说,这非常重要,它指的是游戏的购买次数。在推销新游戏时,每个人都会试图确定它将销售多少台——通常是根据类似游戏的销售情况。

  • Units sold: Primarily important for retail and direct download games, this is simply how many times the game has been purchased. When pitching a new game, everyone will be trying to make determinations about how many units it will sell—often based on how well similar games have sold.

  • 盈亏平衡:发行商必须售出多少套游戏才能收回他们在游戏中投入的资金。例如,如果游戏的开发和营销成本为 40 万美元,而每售出一套游戏可获得 5 美元,则盈亏平衡点为售出 8 万套游戏。低于这个数字,您就会亏钱;高于这个数字,您就会盈利。

  • Breakeven: How many units of the game have to be sold before the publisher makes back the money they put into the game. For example, if the game cost $400,000 to develop and market, and you collect $5 for every unit sold, breakeven will be at 80,000 units sold. Below that, you lose money—above that, you make profit.

免费游戏业务条款

Free-to-Play Business Terms

  • 流失率:您每月流失的玩家比例是多少?理想情况下,这个数字是零。流失率越高,留存率就越低,每个人都会问“我们该怎么做才能让他们继续玩?”

  • Churn: What percent of players do you lose each month? Ideally, this number is zero. The bigger the churn, the worse your retention, and everyone will ask “What can we do to keep them playing?”

  • 获取成本:平均而言,你需要花多少钱才能吸引用户下载并玩你的游戏?

  • Cost of acquisition: How much do you have to spend, on average, to get someone to download and play your game?

  • DAU:每日活跃用户。过去 24 小时内有多少人玩过你的游戏?这是衡量免费游戏最简单的指标,显然数值越大越好,因此 DAU 备受关注。

  • DAU: daily active users. How many people played your game in the last twenty four hours? This is the easiest fact about an F2P game to measure, and obviously bigger is better, so DAU gets a lot of attention.

  • MAU:月活跃用户。上个月有多少玩家玩过你的游戏?等一下,这难道不应该是 DAU × 30 吗?不。如果每天都有同一批玩家玩你的游戏,那么你的 MAU 将等于你的 DAU。如果流失率很高,你的 MAU 将远高于 DAU。MAU/DAU 比率非常重要。

  • MAU: monthly active users. How many players played your game in the last month? Wait a second, shouldn’t this just be DAU × 30? No. If you have the same set of people playing your game every day, then your MAU will equal your DAU. If you have high churn, your MAU will be much greater than your DAU. Much is made of the MAU/DAU ratio.

  • ARPU:每用户平均收入。通常按月计算。换句话说,计算出过去 30 天内的收入,然后除以 MAU,即可得出 ARPU。

  • ARPU: average revenue per user. Typically this is quoted monthly. In other words, figure out how much money is collected in the last thirty days, and divide it by your MAU, and that gives you your ARPU.

  • ARPPU:平均每付费用户收入。也就是说,只看付费玩家,他们平均要付多少钱?和 ARPU 一样,这通常也是按月计算的。这个数字会比你的 ARPU 高(通常高得多)。

  • ARPPU: average revenue per paying user. That is, just looking at the players who pay money, how much to do they pay, on average? Like ARPU, this is also usually calculated on a monthly basis. This number will be higher (usually much higher) than your ARPU.

  • LTV:终身价值。从玩家首次尝试你的游戏到他们退出并再也不玩游戏,你能从普通玩家身上赚多少钱?这个数字很难计算,但非常重要,因为它告诉你可以安全地花多少钱来吸引新玩家。如果你的普通玩家的 LTV 是 5 美元,花 4 美元吸引新玩家是一个合理的想法,因为最终你会从他们身上赚到 1 美元。但如果你的 LTV 是 3 美元,花 4 美元就是愚蠢的。

  • LTV: lifetime value. How much money are you making from the average player from when they first try your game till the time when they quit and never play again? This is a hard number to calculate, but it is very important, since it tells you how much you can safely spend to acquire new players. If the LTV of your average player is $5, it is a reasonable idea to spend $4 to acquire a new player, because eventually you’ll make a dollar from them. But if your LTV is $3, spending $4 would be foolish.

  • K 因子:这是从病毒式营销领域借用的一个术语,病毒式营销又从医学领域借用了这个术语。简单来说就是:你的普通玩家能带来多少新玩家?如果你的游戏非常流行,每个人都会邀请朋友来玩,那么你的 K 因子就很高。高 K 因子非常重要,因为强大的病毒式传播会大大降低获取成本。

  • K-factor: This is a term borrowed from the world of viral marketing, who borrowed it from the world of medicine. It is simply this: How many other new players does your average player bring in? If your game is very viral, and everyone is getting their friends to play, your k-factor is high. A high k-factor is very important, because strong virality drastically lowers the cost of acquisition.

  • 鲸鱼玩家:这个不太好听的术语指的是那些为免费游戏支付大量费用的玩家。如果能帮助他们取得成功,有些人会支付数百甚至数千美元。免费游戏设计师非常关注鲸鱼玩家,因为他们可以构成游戏收入的很大一部分。一项研究发现,50% 的游戏收入仅来自 0.15% 的玩家。如果你 50% 的收入来自鲸鱼玩家,而你刚刚找到了让鲸鱼玩家花费比平时多一倍的方法,那就大有裨益了。

  • Whale: This unflattering term refers to players that pay A LOT for F2P games. Some will pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars if it helps them succeed. F2P designers pay a lot of attention to whales, as they can constitute a significant percentage of revenues for a game. One study found that 50% of game revenue comes from only 0.15% of players. If 50% of your revenue comes from whales, and you just found a way to get the whales to spend double what they normally do, that’s a big deal.

当然,还有很多,但我列出这些只是为了给你一个样本。你会发现它们真的没有那么复杂。如果你能熟悉这种语言,并且在听到你不认识的术语时勇敢地要求解释,那么有钱人就会开始尊重你,因为他们会看到你关心他们认为重要的事情。而这些事情很重要——没有它们,游戏设计就不能成为一种职业,而只能是一种爱好。

There’s lots more of these, of course, but I list these just to give you a sample. You see they really aren’t that complicated. If you can have some familiarity with this kind of language and are brave enough to ask for explanations when you hear terms you don’t know, the money people will start to respect you, because they’ll see you care about the things they think are important. And these things are important—without them, game design couldn’t be a career, only a hobby.

了解畅销商品

Know the Top Sellers

试试这个:无论你最关心什么平台,现在就列出去年最赚钱的 10 款电子游戏。列出清单后,上网将清单与现实情况进行比较。如果清单完美匹配,那很好。如果不是,你应该想想为什么你错了。你没有意识到基于电影系列的游戏如此受欢迎吗?你忘记了免费游戏吗?你认为 Pokémon 不会在名单上吗?你认为你最喜欢的游戏就是其他人都喜欢的游戏吗?我可以向你保证,任何你向其推销的资助者都能说出前十名游戏。为什么?因为游戏行业是一个由热门游戏驱动的行业。发行商靠热门游戏赚钱,因此他们会仔细研究热门游戏,试图了解是什么让它们成功。

Try this: for whatever platform you care about most, make a list, right now, of the top ten moneymaking videogames of the last year. After you make your list, go on the web and compare reality to your list. If you had a perfect match, good job. If not, you should think about why you were off base. Did you not realize that titles based on movie franchises were so popular? Did you forget about F2P games? Did you think Pokémon wouldn’t be on the list? Did you assume that the games you liked best were the games everyone else liked? I can guarantee you that any funder you pitch to can name the top ten games. Why? Because the game industry is a hit-driven business. Publishers make their money off of big hits, and so they study the hits scrupulously, in an attempt to understand what made them successful.

如果你想了解发行商的想法,你需要分析热门游戏。电子娱乐设计与研究公司 ( www.eedar.com ) 将这种分析提升到了一个新的水平,他们逐一分析游戏的功能,并进行复杂的数学分析,试图了解哪些功能对每款游戏的财务成功贡献最大。多人游戏有多重要?游戏时间有多重要?这样,开发商和发行商就可以将这些数据用于未来的游戏。

If you want to understand how publishers think, you need to analyze the hits. One company, Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (www.eedar.com), is taking this analysis to new levels by breaking games down feature by feature and performing complex mathematical analysis to try to understand which features contributed most to the financial success of each title. How much does multiplayer matter? How much do hours of gameplay matter? This is so developers and publishers can use these data for future titles.

不管你怎么做,都要找到某种方法来熟悉你所在市场和人群中的热门游戏,并了解它们为何如此成功。这将帮助你与投资人建立共识。如果你对某些游戏设计为何能赚这么多钱有独到的见解,我可以保证投资人会想听听你的看法。

However you do it, find some way to get familiar with the hits in your market and demographic and understand why they were so successful. It will help you build a common understanding with the money people. And if you have special insights as to why certain game designs made so much money, I can guarantee that the money people will want to hear what you have to say.

屏障的重要性

The Importance of Barriers

我将叹息着讲述这一切

很久很久以后的某个地方:

树林里分出两条路,而我——

我选择了人迹罕至的那条路,

这带来了很大的不同。

—罗伯特·弗罗斯特

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

—Robert Frost

当无需发行商的可下载游戏成为现实时,独立开发者们将其视为小玩家的巨大胜利。现在,任何有好主意的小开发者都可以与最大的游戏发行商竞争。事实也确实如此!例如,在 iOS 市场,一些游戏开发者发现他们可以通过在应用商店以 6.99 美元的价格出售自制游戏来赚取非常舒适的生活。很快,世界嗅到了淘金热的气息,成千上万的游戏开始出现。价格开始下降:4.99 美元成为标准,然后是 3.99 美元、2.99 美元、1.99 美元、0.99 美元,最后是免费。具有讽刺意味的是,在一个标准价格是免费的,最有可能从游戏中赚钱的游戏制造商是那些能够吸引数百万玩家的游戏制造商——而在拥挤的市场中,这意味着要在营销上投入大量资金,因此,我们再次面临一种对大型发行商非常有利的局面。将游戏推向商店不再是一个挑战——现在的挑战是在成千上万的竞争对手中脱颖而出。这使得每个在这些市场中创建游戏的人都必须在营销方面深思熟虑(并且往往要投入大量资金)。像这样充斥着供应商的市场通常被称为“红海”市场,让人联想到鱼吃鱼的世界,水中充满了鲜血。如何生存?要么成为最大的鱼,要么去寻找“蓝海”。

When downloadable games that required no publisher became a reality, it was hailed by independent developers as massive win for the little guy. Surely, now, any little developer with a great idea could compete with the very biggest game publishers. And it was true! In the iOS market, for example, some game developers found they could earn a very comfortable living selling their homemade games for $6.99 in the app store. Soon, the world smelled the gold rush, and games started to appear by the thousands. And the prices started to drop: $4.99 became standard, then $3.99, $2.99, $1.99, then $.99, and finally, free. And ironically, in a market where the standard price was free, the game makers with the best chance of making money on their games were the ones who could get millions and millions of players—and in a crowded market, that meant spending a lot on marketing, and so, once again, we have a situation that significantly favors large publishers. No longer is it a challenge to get your game into the store—the challenge now is to stand out among the thousands of competitors. This has made it necessary for everyone who creates games in these markets to think heavily (and often spend heavily) when it comes to marketing. Markets like this, which are flooded with suppliers, are often referred to as “red ocean” markets, conjuring up a picture of a fish-eat-fish world where there is a great deal of blood in the water. How to survive? Either be the biggest fish or go find a “blue ocean.”

“蓝海”是指竞争相对较少的市场。有时,市场如此,是因为它们非常新。但有时,这些市场存在壁垒,阻止其他人进入。如果你能进入其中一个市场,对你来说将非常有利。目前,iOS 市场就像一片红海,应用商店中 90% 的游戏都在亏损,只有 10% 左右的游戏盈利。相比之下,老虎机行业由于政府监管、特殊硬件、特殊专业知识以及对特殊算法的依赖,是电子游戏市场中很难进入的一个领域。在这个市场中,大约 90% 的游戏都是盈利的,只有 10% 左右的游戏亏损。壁垒对盈利能力有很大影响,因此,如果你能利用这些壁垒,你绝对应该利用它们。壁垒有很多种,下面是一些需要考虑的因素:

“Blue oceans” are places with relatively few competitors. Sometimes markets are like this because they are very new. But other times these are places where there are barriers that keep other people from entering. If you can get into one of these places, it can be very much to your advantage. At the present time, the iOS market is such a red ocean that 90% of games in the app store lose money, and only about 10% are profitable. Contrast that with the slot machine industry, which, due to government regulations, special hardware, special expertise, and dependence on special algorithms, is a very hard part of the videogame market to enter. In this market, about 90% of the games are profitable, and only about 10% lose money. Barriers make a huge difference to profitability, so if you can take advantage of them, you definitely should. Barriers come in many varieties—here are a few to consider:

  • 技术障碍:这可能包括特殊算法,这些算法可以带来新的游戏玩法、新的外观和感觉,也可能是一种允许独特多人游戏玩法的新型服务器技术。许多游戏通过解决其他游戏无法轻易复制的困难技术问题而取得了巨大成功。

  • Technical barriers: This can include special algorithms that make for new kinds of gameplay, or a new look and feel, or possibly a new kind of server technology that allows for unique multiplayer gameplay. Many games have had great success by solving difficult technical problems that others can’t easily replicate.

  • 硬件壁垒:如果你创建了一种新型硬件平台,甚至可能受专利保护,那么其他人很难迅速跟进。例如,当 Skylanders 问世时,每个人都认为这是一个好主意,但很少有公司能够创造出具有竞争力的产品。

  • Hardware barriers: If you have created a new kind of hardware platform, possibly even one protected by patents, it will be hard for others to quickly follow you. When Skylanders came out, for example, everyone agreed it was a good idea, but very few companies were able to create a competitive product.

  • 专业知识障碍:也许您了解所有关于儿童早期社交情感学习的知识,并且您发现有助于此的游戏确实存在市场。没有您这样深入理解的人将很难竞争。

  • Expertise barriers: Maybe you know all there is to know about early childhood social–emotional learning, and you find there is a real market for games that help with that. People who don’t have your level of deep understanding will have a hard time competing.

  • 销售和分销障碍:我曾与他人共同创办了一家公司,该公司试图向消防员销售训练游戏。我们很快意识到,我们需要一支庞大的销售队伍,逐个区域销售我们的软件。其他培训公司已经建立了销售关系和销售队伍——由于我们负担不起,所以我们很快就开始了一项新业务。如果您与某个市场有特殊的销售关系(或可以找到有这种关系的合作伙伴),请考虑如何利用它。

  • Sales and distribution barriers: I once cofounded a company that tried to sell training games to firefighters. We quickly realized that we would need a giant sales force to sell our software precinct by precinct. Other training companies already had sales relationships and sales forces in place—since we couldn’t afford to do that, we quickly got into a new business. If you have a special sales relationship (or can find a partner that does) with a certain market, think about how to take advantage of it.

  • 想象力障碍:任何人都可以制作 Minecraft。这不是一款非常复杂的游戏。但只有一个人认为制作这样的游戏并以简单的固定费用出售是可行的。

  • Imagination barriers: Anybody could have made Minecraft. It is not a very complicated game. But only one guy saw that making a game like that and selling it for a simple flat fee could work.

  • 关系障碍:有些游戏需要特殊的合作伙伴,例如电影或特许经营许可。如果许可方只与他们信任的人合作,那么如果你与他们有特殊关系,那么这将是一个阻碍其他人竞争的重大障碍。

  • Relationship barriers: Some games require a special partner, maybe for a movie or franchise license. If the licensor will only work with people they trust, that is a significant barrier that keeps others from competing, if you have a special relationship with them.

  • 不确定性障碍:疯狂的新平台层出不穷。有时每个人都会兴奋不已,纷纷加入。有时,开发者则更加不确定。当 Microsoft Kinect 发布时,大多数开发者都怀疑它能否成功。但少数开发者跨越了不确定性障碍,大胆尝试,当它的销量出乎意料地高时,他们收获了利润,成为出乎意料地受欢迎的平台上为数不多的游戏之一。

  • Uncertainty barriers: Crazy new platforms are announced all the time. Sometimes everyone gets excited and jumps on them. Other times, developers are more uncertain. When the Microsoft Kinect was announced, most developers were skeptical that it would succeed. But a handful jumped the barrier of uncertainty and took a gamble on it, and when sales of it were unexpectedly high, they reaped the benefits of being one of very few games available for an unexpectedly popular platform.

大多数人看到障碍时都会避开。他们觉得随大流更舒服。但随大流最终意味着与大众作斗争。许多成功的开发商发现,选择一条人迹罕至的道路确实会带来巨大的改变。

Most people avoid barriers when they see them. They feel more comfortable following the crowd. But following the crowd means eventually fighting the crowd. Many successful developers have found that choosing the road less traveled by has indeed made all the difference.

在下一章中,我们将讨论比金钱更重要的事情。

In the next chapter, we’ll talk about something far more important than money.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 摩根·拉姆齐 (Morgan Ramsay) 著《游戏玩家在工作》。游戏行业商业故事的宝库。

  • Gamers at Work by Morgan Ramsay. A treasure trove of game industry business stories.

  • Rob Fahey 和 Nicholas Lovell 编写的《F2P 工具箱》。为 F2P 游戏设计师提供实用建议的优秀合集。

  • The F2P Toolbox by Rob Fahey and Nicholas Lovell. An excellent collection of practical advice for designers of F2P games.

  • 罗杰·科曼 (Roger Corman) 著《我在好莱坞拍了一百部电影却一分钱都没花》。科曼以低成本制作引人入胜的电影的不可思议的方法对游戏设计师有着惊人的启示。

  • How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime by Roger Corman. Corman’s incredible methods for creating captivating cinema on the cheap have surprising relevance for game designers.

第三十三

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

游戏改变玩家

Games Transform Their Players



33.1

FIGURE

33.1

游戏如何改变我们?

How Do Games Change Us?

关于游戏对大脑的长期影响,存在很多争论。有些人认为游戏没有持久的影响,只是暂时分散注意力。另一些人认为玩游戏可能很危险,会煽动玩家暴力或因上瘾而毁掉他们的生活。还有些人认为游戏对我们非常有益,它们将成为 21 世纪教育的基石。

There is much debate about the long-term effect of games on the mind. Some believe that they have no lasting effect and that they just serve as a momentary distraction. Others believe that gameplay can be dangerous, inciting players to violence or ruining their lives through addiction. Still others believe that games are so good for us that they will become the cornerstone of twenty-first-century education.

游戏如何改变我们并不是一个简单的问题,因为它的答案正在改变着我们所说的社会——无论是向好的方向还是向坏的方向。

How games change us is not a trivial question, for the answer to it is transforming society as we speak—either for the better or for the worse.

游戏对你有好处吗?

Can Games Be Good for You?

游戏对人类来说是如此自然,并且能带来如此多的乐趣,因此只有那些具有极端哲学倾向的人才会认为所有游戏都是有害的。游戏常常被归因于一些积极的影响。

Games come so naturally to humans and afford so much pleasure that only someone of a very extreme philosophical orientation would maintain that all gameplay is harmful. Several positive effects are often attributed to games.

情感维护

Emotional Maintenance

游戏是人们为了保持和控制自己的情绪和情感状态而参与的众多活动之一。人们玩游戏是为了

Games are one of many activities that people engage in to try to maintain and control their mood and emotional state. People play games to try to

  • 发泄愤怒和沮丧:游戏,特别是涉及大量体力活动的运动(足球、篮球)或涉及大量快速动作和战斗的电子游戏,可以成为一种宣泄方式,让你在安全的游戏世界中将自己的感受发泄在别人身上。

  • Vent anger and frustration: Games, particularly sports involving a lot of physical activity (football, basketball) or videogames involving a lot of fast action and battles, can be a cathartic way to “take out your feelings” on someone else in the safe world of the game.

  • 振作起来:当一个人情绪低落时,一些有搞笑情节的异想天开的游戏(《Cranium》《Mario Party》)可以让你忘记烦恼,记住你仍然可以享受乐趣。

  • Cheer up: When a person is depressed, whimsical games with funny situations (Cranium, Mario Party) can be a way to take your mind off your troubles and remember that you can still have fun.

  • 获得洞察力:有时,我们的烦恼会变得非常严重,一些小事情似乎就是世界末日。玩游戏让我们远离现实世界的问题,所以当我们回来时,我们更容易看清它们的真面目。

  • Gain perspective: There are times when our troubles loom large on us and little things seem like they are the end of the world. Playing games gives us some distance from our real-world problems, so when we return, we more easily see them for what they are.

  • 建立信心:在现实生活中经历了几次失败后,你很容易开始觉得自己什么都不擅长,这会让你觉得生活中的一切都超出了你的控制范围。玩一款你的选择和行动可以带来成功结果的游戏可以给你一种掌控感,这有助于提醒你你可以成功,你可以控制自己的命运。

  • Build confidence: After a few real-life failures, it is easy to start to feel like you aren’t good at anything, which can lead to a feeling that everything in your life is beyond your control. Playing a game where your choices and actions can lead to a successful outcome can give a feeling of mastery that helps remind you that you can succeed and that you have some control over your destiny.

  • 放松:有时我们无法摆脱烦恼,因为烦恼太多或太多。游戏迫使我们的大脑参与一些与烦恼完全无关的事情,让我们暂时逃避烦恼,并给予我们急需的“情感休息”。

  • Relax: Sometimes we are simply unable to let go of our worries, because of either their size or their sheer number. Games force our brains to engage with something completely unconnected to our worries, letting us escape them for a while and giving us a much needed “emotional rest.”

虽然出于这些原因玩游戏的努力有时会适得其反(例如,如果游戏和现实生活一样令人沮丧),但总体而言,游戏可以很好地完成上述任务,成为帮助我们维持情绪健康的工具。

And while it is true that efforts to play games for these reasons sometimes backfire—if the game proves just as frustrating as real life, for example—in general, games serve the aforementioned tasks fairly well, acting as tools that help maintain our emotional health.

正在连接

Connecting

与他人建立社交联系并不总是一件容易的事。我们每个人都有自己的问题和担忧,而其他人可能不理解或不关心。游戏可以充当“社交桥梁”,让我们有理由相互交流,让我们看到其他人如何应对各种情况,引入谈话主题,向我们展示我们的共同点,并创造共同的回忆。这些因素的结合使游戏成为帮助我们与生活中重要的人建立和维持关系的绝佳工具。

Connecting socially with others is not always an easy thing to do. We are each caught up in our own problems and worries that others might not understand or care about. Games can act as a “social bridge,” giving us reasons to interact with each other, letting us see how others respond to a variety of situations, introducing topics of conversation, showing us what we have in common, and creating shared memories. This combination of factors makes games a great tool to help build and maintain relationships with the important people in our lives.

锻炼

Exercise

游戏,尤其是体育游戏,给了我们进行健康体育锻炼的理由和动力。最近的研究表明,脑力锻炼对健康有益,尤其是对老年人。游戏解决问题的本质使它们成为灵活的工具,以多种形式提供身体和脑力锻炼。随着数字技术变得越来越小、越来越便携,如何使用它来增强体育锻炼的新途径将继续出现。

Games, particularly sports, give us reason and motivation to perform healthy physical exercise. Recent studies have shown the health benefits of mental exercise, particularly for the elderly. The problem-solving nature of games makes them flexible tools to provide both physical and mental exercises in many forms. As digital technology becomes smaller and more portable, new gateways for how to use it to enhance physical exercise will continue to appear.

教育

Education

我一直希望学习对于孩子们来说可以成为一种游戏和消遣。

—约翰·洛克,1692年

I have always had a fancy that learning might be made a play and recreation to children.

—John Locke, 1692

有些人认为教育是严肃的,而游戏不是,因此游戏在教育中没有地位。但对我们的教育系统进行考察后,就会发现它就是一场游戏!学生(玩家)被给予一系列作业(目标),必须在特定截止日期(时间限制)之前交上去(完成)。随着作业(挑战)越来越难,他们会不断收到成绩(分数)作为反馈,直到课程结束时他们面临期末考试(怪物大王),只有掌握了课程(游戏)中的所有技能,他们才能通过(战胜)考试。表现特别出色的学生(玩家)会被列入荣誉榜(排行榜)。

Some hold the position that education is serious, but games are not; therefore, games have no place in education. But an examination of our educational system shows that it is a game! Students (players) are given a series of assignments (goals) that must be handed in (accomplished) by certain due dates (time limits). They receive grades (scores) as feedback repeatedly as assignments (challenges) get harder and harder, until the end of the course when they are faced with a final exam (boss monster), which they can only pass (defeat) if they have mastered all the skills in the course (game). Students (players) who perform particularly well are listed on the honor roll (leaderboard).

那么,为什么教育不像游戏?这本书的视角清楚地说明了这一点。传统的教育方法往往缺乏惊喜、缺乏投射、缺乏乐趣、缺乏社区,而且兴趣曲线不佳。当马歇尔·麦克卢汉说:“任何认为教育和娱乐不同的人都对两者都不太了解”时,他所说的就是这个。这并不是说学习不有趣,而只是许多教育体验设计得很糟糕。

So, why doesn’t education feel more like a game? The lenses in this book make it pretty clear. Traditional educational methods often feature a real lack of surprises, a lack of projection, a lack of pleasures, a lack of community, and a bad interest curve. When Marshall McLuhan said, “Anyone who thinks education and entertainment are different doesn’t know much about either,” this is what he was talking about. It’s not that learning isn’t fun, but it is just that many educational experiences are poorly designed.

那么,为什么教育类电子游戏在课堂上没有得到更多的关注呢?原因似乎有以下几点:

So why haven’t educational videogames found more of a home in the classroom? There seem to be several reasons:

  • 时间限制:玩游戏可能需要很长时间,而且时间长短不一——许多有意义的教育游戏对于课堂环境来说太长了。

  • Time constraints: Playing games can take a long time and a variable amount of time—many meaningful, educational games are just too long of an experience for a classroom setting.

  • 可变的节奏:游戏的优点之一是让玩家按照自己的节奏进行游戏。在学校环境中,老师通常必须让每个人都保持相同的节奏。

  • Variable pacing: One thing games are good at is letting players proceed at their own pace. In a school setting, the instructor usually has to keep everyone moving along at a single pace.

  • 1965 年:1965 年之前出生的人并不是玩电子游戏长大的;因此,游戏对他们来说并不自然,而且似乎有点陌生。直到最近,教育系统主要由 1965 年之前出生的人管理(高中校长的平均年龄为 49 岁)。

  • 1965: People born before 1965 did not grow up playing videogames; therefore, games do not come naturally to them and seem kind of foreign. Up until recently, the educational system was primarily run by people born before 1965 (the average high school principal is 49 years old).

  • 制作好的教育游戏很难:要制作出既能提供完整、可验证、可评估的课程,又能吸引学生参与的游戏非常困难。平均一个学期的课程包含两三十节不同的课程。

  • Good educational games are hard to make: To create something that delivers a complete, verifiable, assessable lesson, while still engaging students, is very hard. And an average semester class contains two or three dozen different lessons that must be covered.

尽管存在这些挑战,游戏仍是极好的教育工具,但它们作为工具而不是完整的教育系统才是最好的。明智的教育者会使用正确的工具来完成正确的工作——游戏适合哪些教育工作?让我们考虑一下游戏似乎具有优势的一些领域。

Despite these challenges, games can be excellent tools for education, but they work best as tools and not complete educational systems. A wise educator uses the right tool for the right job—what are the right educational jobs for games? Let’s consider some of the areas where games seem to have some advantage.

满足大脑需求

教育之所以困难,部分原因在于它可能会很无聊。游戏本质上非常善于让大脑充分参与其中,这是因为它们满足了大脑的需求。以下是一些例子:

Part of what makes education difficult is that it can be boring. Games, by their nature, are masterful at keeping the brain fully engaged—and this is because they give the brain what it wants. Here are examples:

  • 可见的进步:正如我们在第 14 章谜题中讨论的那样,可见的进步是人类巨大的动力。因此,良好的教育自然必须让学生体验可见的进步。升级和完成任务等游戏结构是使进步清晰可见的一种方式。

  • Visible progress: As we discussed in Chapter 14: Puzzles, visible progress is a tremendous human motivator. So, naturally, good education must let the student experience visible progress. Game structures like leveling up and completing quests are one way to make progress clear and visible.

  • 使抽象具体化:人类大脑面临着抽象概念的挑战。它对具体事物的处理能力更强。这就是为什么好的教师用具体的例子来阐明抽象的原则。游戏具有天然的可操作性,善于将抽象具体化。这就是为什么战争游戏和模拟是军事教育中如此重要的一部分——如果没有战场的具体现实,军事战略的抽象原则就毫无意义。

  • Make the abstract concrete: The human brain is challenged by abstract concepts. It has much more facility with that which is concrete. This is why good teachers use concrete examples to shed light on abstract principles. Games are naturally manipulable and can be good at making the abstract concrete. This is why war games and simulations are such an important part of military education—the abstract principles of military strategy are meaningless without the concrete realities of the battlefield.

  • 全神贯注:当大脑无事可做时,它会变得“发痒”,我们会有一种焦躁不安的感觉。当大脑的某个部分处于活跃状态(例如,听讲座),而其他部分(例如音乐、社交或动觉部分)没有活跃时,我们也会有这种感觉。这就是为什么课堂上的学生经常发现自己在哼歌、和邻座的人耳语或敲击手指的原因——大脑的这些部分渴望活动。游戏擅长全神贯注,占据眼睛、耳朵、手和大脑,通常充满音乐和社交活动。当大脑的每个部分都处于舒适的活动水平时,就不会出现分散注意力的焦躁不安,教育也可以更轻松地进行。

  • Full engagement: When the brain has nothing to do, it gets “itchy,” and we get a kind of restless feeling. We also get this feeling when one part of the brain is engaged (say, listening to a lecture) but another part, such as the musical, social, or kinesthetic part, is not. This is why students in class often find themselves humming, whispering to neighbors, or tapping their fingers—those parts of the brain are eager for activity. Games excel at full engagement, occupying the eyes, ears, hands, and mind, often full of music and social activities. When every part of the mind is at a comfortable level of activity, there can be no level of distracting restlessness, and education can take place more easily.

  • 许多小目标:大脑喜欢明确而有趣的目标,而好的游戏则是一长串具体的、可实现的、有回报的目标。

  • Lots of little goals: The brain loves clear and interesting goals, and good games are long chains of concrete, achievable, rewarding goals.

然而,一旦大脑完全投入其中,它会学到什么呢?

Once the mind is fully engaged, though, what will it learn?

事实

人们自然而然想到使用电子游戏的第一个领域是传达事实并反复练习这些事实。这主要是因为学习事实(州首府、乘法表、传染病名称等)是枯燥和重复的。将它们集成到游戏系统中是一件很容易的事情,当你在学习本身并不有趣的信息时,游戏系统会给予辅助奖励。特别是电子游戏,可以利用视觉效果和有意义的背景来帮助玩家学习和记住这些事实。

One of the first areas that people naturally think of using videogames for is to convey facts and to drill those facts. This works mainly because learning facts (state capitals, times tables, names of infectious diseases, etc.) is dull and repetitive. It is an easy thing to integrate them into game systems that give auxiliary rewards as you make progress learning information that is not inherently interesting. Videogames, in particular, can make use of visuals and meaningful context that can help players learn and remember these facts.

解决问题

组合游戏似乎是生产性思维的基本特征。

-艾尔伯特爱因斯坦

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

—Albert Einstein

还记得我们对游戏的定义吗?游戏是一种以好玩的态度进行的解决问题的活动。当然,在练习解决问题时,游戏有机会大放异彩,特别是在学生需要机会展示他们可以以综合的方式使用各种不同的技能和技术的情况下。因此,在需要在现实环境中结合多种技术的领域,例如警察和救援工作、地质学、建筑和管理,游戏式模拟可能会开始充当期末考试。

Remember our definition of game? A problem-solving activity approached with a playful attitude. Naturally, when it comes to practicing problem solving, games have a chance to shine, particularly in cases where students need an opportunity to show that they can use a variety of different skills and techniques in an integrated way. For this reason, it may be the case that gamelike simulations may start to serve as final exams in areas where multiple techniques need to be combined in a realistic setting, such as police and rescue work, geology, architecture, and management.

除了课堂作业,值得注意的是,整整一代人都在玩非常复杂的电子游戏长大,如果玩家想要成功,这些游戏需要大量的计划、策略和耐心。有人认为,这将导致一代人比以往任何一代人更善于解决问题——这是否属实还有待观察。

Classroom work aside, it is interesting to note that an entire generation is being raised playing very complex videogames that require a great deal of planning, strategy, and patience if the player is to succeed. Some theorize that this will lead to a generation that is far better at problem solving than any previous generation—whether this is true remains to be seen.

关系系统

游戏最擅长的教学内容可以用古老的禅宗公案来阐释:

The thing that games arguably are best at teaching is illustrated by an ancient Zen koan:

  • 百丈想派一名僧人去开办一座新寺院。他告诉弟子们,谁能最有效地回答问题,谁就能被任命。他把一个水瓶放在地上,问道:“谁能说出这是什么,而不叫出它的名字?”

  • Hyakujo wished to send a monk to open a new monastery. He told his pupils that whoever answered a question most ably would be appointed. Placing a water vase on the ground, he asked: “Who can say what this is without calling its name?”

  • 住持说道:“没人能称其为木鞋。”

  • The chief monk said: “No one can call it a wooden shoe.”

  • 做饭的和尚伊桑用脚踩翻了花瓶,然后走了出去。

  • Isan, the cooking monk, tipped over the vase with his foot and went out.

  • 百丈笑着说:“住持输了。”于是,伊山就成了新寺院的住持。

  • Hyakujo smiled and said: “The chief monk loses.” And Isan became the master of the new monastery.

住持知道他的话无法说明水瓶的真面目,所以他狡猾地试图说出它不是的样子。但伊桑受过最实用的艺术训练——烹饪,他很清楚有些事情是无法用语言来理解的——必须通过演示才能理解。

The chief monk knew his words could not tell the truth of what a water vase really is like, so he slyly tried to say what it was not. But Isan, whose training was in the most practical of arts, cooking, knew well that some things cannot be understood with words—they must be demonstrated to be understood.

交互式演示是游戏和模拟的优势之一。教育研究人员经常引用米勒的学习金字塔:

And interactive demonstration is one place that games and simulations excel. Education researchers frequently refer to Miller’s pyramid of learning:



33.2

FIGURE

33.2

在这种模式下,能够做某事是知识的顶峰,而基于游戏的学习几乎完全专注于做。

In this model, being able to do something is the pinnacle of knowledge, and game-based learning is almost entirely focused on doing.

讲座、阅读材料和视频都存在线性的弱点,而线性媒介很难传达复杂的关系系统。理解复杂关系系统的唯一方法是玩转它,并全面了解一切是如何联系在一起的。

Lectures, readings, and videos all have the weakness of being linear, and a linear medium is a very difficult way to convey a complex system of relationships. The only way to understand a complex system of relationships is to play with it and to get a holistic sense of how everything is connected.

通过模拟可以最好地理解一些关系系统,包括:

Some systems of relationships best understood via simulation include:

  • 人体循环系统

  • The human circulatory system

  • 大城市的交通模式

  • Traffic patterns in a major city

  • 核反应堆

  • A nuclear reactor

  • 细胞的运作

  • The workings of a cell

  • 濒危物种生态学

  • The ecology of endangered species

  • 地球大气层的加热和冷却

  • Heating and cooling in the earth’s atmosphere

那些只读过这些内容的人和玩过模拟游戏的人在理解上有着巨大的差异,因为玩家不仅读过关系系统,还亲身体验过它们。他们体验这些系统最有力的方式之一就是测试自己的极限,推动模拟游戏直到它崩溃。需要多少交通才能使通勤时间比工作日更长?反应堆在熔毁前会损失多少水?什么会不可逆转地融化极地冰盖?模拟允许玩家失败,这(除了有趣之外)非常具有教育意义——因为学习者不仅能看到失败,还能看到失败的原因,从而对整个系统的运作产生重大洞察。

There is a tremendous difference in understanding between people who have merely read about these things and people who have played with simulations of them, because the players have not just read about the systems of relationships but also experienced them. And one of the most powerful ways they experience them is by testing their limits, pushing the simulation until it breaks. How much traffic does it take to make the commute time longer than the workday? How much water can the reactor lose before it melts down? What will irreversibly melt the polar ice caps? Simulations give the player permission to fail, which (aside from being fun) is incredibly educational—because the learner not only sees the failures but sees why they happened, which leads to significant insight about the workings of the whole system.

我见过的最引人注目的例子之一是 Impact Games 的《和平使者》。《和平使者》模拟了以色列/巴勒斯坦冲突,玩家可以选择扮演以色列总理或巴勒斯坦总统,目标是努力实现两国之间的和平。当与这些国家的本地人一起测试游戏时,当地人通常会带着这样的信念进入游戏,即如果对方做一些简单的事情,冲突就会结束。然而,当他们试图扮演对方时,他们很快就会发现事情并不像他们想象的那么简单;双方的复杂压力使得缓解冲突非常困难。然后玩家很快就会屈服于好奇心。首先,他们试图看看需要什么才能让这些国家全面开战,当他们明白这一点后,他们试图解决这个大难题:是否有任何技巧可以成功地实现这些国家之间的和平?

One of the most striking instances of this I have ever seen is in the game Peacemaker from Impact Games. Peacemaker is a simulation of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, where players have the choice of playing the role of either the Israeli prime minister or the Palestinian president, with a goal of trying to make peace between the two nations. When playtesting the game with natives of these countries, the natives would often enter the game with a belief that if the other side would do a few simple things, the conflict would be over. As they would attempt to play the opposing side, however, they would quickly see it wasn’t as simple as they thought; complex pressures on both sides make it very difficult to reduce the conflict. Players then quickly succumb to curiosity. First, they try to see what it takes to bring these nations to all-out war, and when they have that out of their systems, they try to solve the big challenge: are there any techniques that will successfully work to make peace between these nations?

人们经常反对模拟如此严肃的话题。这些模拟似乎不可能完美无缺。如果玩模拟游戏的人学会了一种只在模拟中有效但在现实世界中会造成灾难性的技巧,该怎么办?因此,如果有现场指导员能够指出差异并将其用作教学时机,模拟效果通常会更好。但值得注意的是,人们并不期望模拟完全准确,而且模拟漏洞往往非常具有启发性——它们会让玩家疑惑“为什么这不会发生在现实世界中?”这个问题本身就可以让人们深入了解现实世界的实际运作方式。换句话说,在某些情况下,有缺陷的模拟比完美的模拟更有启发性!

Objections are often raised about simulating such serious topics. It seems unlikely that these simulations can be perfect. What if someone who plays with a simulation learns a technique that is only valid in the simulation but would be disastrous in the real world? For this reason, simulations often work much better with a live instructor who is able to point out the discrepancies and use them as teaching moments. It is worth noting, though, that people do not expect simulations to be completely accurate, and often, the simulation loopholes can be very instructive—they cause players to wonder “why doesn’t this happen in the real world?” That question alone can lead to deep insights about how the real world actually works. In other words, in some cases, a flawed simulation can be more instructive than a perfect one!

新见解

在电影《土拨鼠日》中,比尔·默里扮演一个自私、傲慢的角色,他陷入了时间循环,被迫一遍又一遍地重复同一天,直到他做对为止。在重复那一天的过程中,他尝试了如何与周围的人互动,逐渐越来越了解他们。这种理解让他有了洞察力,促使他改变自己的行为,直到最后他变成了那种愿意做正确事情的人,当他终于逃离 2 月 2 日时,他已经是一个改变了的人。

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a selfish, arrogant character who gets caught in a time loop that forces him to relive the same day over and over until he gets it right. Over the many repeats of that day, he experiments with how to interact with people around him, gradually understanding them better and better. This understanding gives him insights that cause him to alter his behavior, until finally he has become the kind of person that willfully does the right thing, and when he finally escapes February 2, he is a changed man.

模拟人际关系系统的重要部分是给予玩家新的见解——他们能够以以前无法想象的方式看待这些系统。创造视角的改变从而产生新的见解是游戏非常擅长的事情,因为游戏创造了全新的现实,有新的规则,你不再是你,你扮演着完全不同的角色。游戏的这种力量才刚刚开始被挖掘出来,用于改善人们的生活。人们常说,在低收入社区长大的孩子往往对职业抱负的目标较低,因为他们根本无法想象自己能在高薪职业中取得成功。如果游戏可以用来帮助他们想象成功,并让他们觉得成功更容易实现,那会怎样?如果游戏可以帮助人们了解如何摆脱虐待关系、戒掉毒瘾,或者只是成为一名更好的志愿者,那会怎样?也许我们才刚刚开始触及游戏如何改变生活的皮毛。

The important part of simulations of systems of relationships is the new insights that are given to the players—they are able to see these systems in ways they couldn’t before. And creating the change in perspective that leads to new insights is something games are very good at, since games create whole new realities, with new sets of rules, where you aren’t you anymore and you play the role of someone else entirely. This is a power of games that is just beginning to be tapped for the purposes of improving people’s lives. It is often said that children who grow up in low-income neighborhoods tend to aim lower in career aspirations because they simply can’t imagine they could succeed at a high-paying career. What if games could be used to help them imagine success and make it seem more achievable to them? What if games could help people understand how to escape an abusive relationship, break an addiction, or simply be a better volunteer? Perhaps we have just begun to scratch the surface of how life-changing games can be.

好奇心

消除无聊的良药是好奇心。好奇心无药可治。

—多萝西·帕克

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

—Dorothy Parker

好奇心强的学生总是比不好奇的学生更有优势,因为好奇的学生更有可能自学,也更有可能记住他们学到的东西,因为他们学习是因为他们想学。从某种意义上说,好奇心让你“拥有”你的学习,而好奇心让你“拥有”你的学习。你所拥有的知识就是你所保留的知识。但最近互联网的普及使这一优势增加了一千倍。一个好奇的学生现在可以学习任何学科的知识——关于人类已知的每个主题的所有信息只需点击一下鼠标即可获得,或者很快就会获得。一个明显的“好奇心鸿沟”似乎很可能开始出现,因为好奇的人会很快成长为他们感兴趣的任何主题的专家,而好奇心不强的人将被远远抛在后面。在未来几十年里,好奇心可能是一个人最宝贵的财富。

It has always been true that students who are curious have an advantage over their classmates who are not, because curious students are more likely to learn things on their own and they are more likely to retain what they learn, since they learn it because they want to. In a sense, curiosity makes you “own” your learning, and the learning you own is the learning you keep. But the recent proliferation of Internet access has increased this advantage a thousand times. A curious student can now learn as much as they want about any subject—all the information about every topic known to humankind is only a click away or will be soon. It seems very likely that a noticeable “curiosity gap” will begin to appear, since curious people will quickly grow to become experts at whatever topics interest them, while the incurious will be left far behind. It is possible that, in the coming decades, a curious mind may be the most valuable asset a person can have.

然而,令人惊讶的是,我们对好奇心知之甚少。好奇心是与生俱来的,还是可以后天习得的?如果好奇心可以习得、培养或强化,那么它难道不应该成为教育的重中之重吗?现在回想一下第4 章游戏,我们对游戏的定义是:“满足好奇心的操纵”。将我们的教育系统转向更多以游戏为基础的模式,是否可能是让孩子们为 21 世纪的成长做好准备的最佳方式?

Surprisingly, though, we know very little about curiosity. Is it something we are born with, or is it something that can be taught? If it can be taught, nurtured, or strengthened, shouldn’t that become a top educational priority? Now recall from Chapter 4: Game, our definition of play: “manipulation that indulges curiosity.” Could it be that shifting our educational systems toward more play-based models might be the best possible way to prepare children to thrive in the twenty-first century?

创造可教时刻

知识不能简单地灌输到大脑中,就像把咖啡倒进杯子里一样。必须让大脑处于一种准备状态,在这种状态下,某些知识突然变得有用和重要,大脑会如饥似渴地伸出手去抓住知识,吸收它,立即使用,并保存起来以备后用。优秀的教师专注于描绘情景和提出问题,让学生的大脑进入这种状态。游戏有具体的情境和需要解决的问题,可以成为帮助教师创造这些时刻的绝佳工具。

Knowledge cannot simply be poured into a mind, like pouring coffee into a cup. The mind must be put into a state of readiness, a state where certain kinds of knowledge are suddenly useful and important and the mind hungrily reaches out to grab the knowledge, to absorb it, to use it immediately, and to save it for later. Good teachers focus on painting scenarios and posing problems that put the minds of the students into this state. Games, with their concrete situations and their problems to be solved, can be an excellent tool for helping an instructor create these moments.

转型游戏

Transformational Games

教育游戏是一种有益的游戏,但正如我们之前所见,它并不是唯一的游戏。帮助我们锻炼身体、与他人联系或改变习惯的游戏也具有重大的帮助意义。为了涵盖这一更广泛的议程,一些人开始使用“严肃游戏”一词来将它们与仅用于娱乐的游戏区分开来。我觉得这个短语不令人满意,因为它不仅是对娱乐的侮辱(娱乐确实是一项严肃的努力),而且还暗示严肃性是游戏的主要目标,并且不鼓励玩家在玩游戏时获得乐趣。我更喜欢“变革游戏”这个短语,因为它不仅涵盖了各种有益的游戏,而且还说明了这些游戏的主要目的——改变玩家。近年来,我对变革游戏进行了深入研究,并致力于开发其中的几种。在此过程中,我学到了一些做好这些游戏的技巧和窍门,我很高兴在这里分享。

Educational games are one kind of helpful game, but, as we’ve seen earlier, not the only kind. Games that help us exercise, connect with others, or change our habits are also meaningfully helpful. To encompass this broader agenda, some have started to use the phrase serious games to separate them from games that are only for entertainment. I find this phrase dissatisfactory, for not only is it an insult to entertainment (which is a serious endeavor, indeed), but also it suggests that seriousness is the primary goal of the games and that players are discouraged from having fun while playing them. I much prefer the phrase transformational games, because not only does it encompass a wide array of helpful games, but also it speaks to the primary purpose of these games—to change the player. In recent years, I have made a great study of transformational games and have worked to develop several of them. In doing so, I have picked up a few tips and tricks for doing them well, which I’m glad to share here.

转型秘诀 1:明确转型目标

Transformational Tip #1: Define Your Transformation

使用“变革性游戏”这一短语的最重要原因可能是它可以帮助每个人记住创建游戏的目标:改变玩家。但如果这是我们的目标,我们究竟将如何改变他们?设计师经常将他们的目标陈述为“我的游戏教数学”或“我的游戏让人们锻炼身体”。但这些只是模糊的陈述。他们没有说明玩家会发生什么样的变化,也没有说明这种变化将如何发生。想想看,当你说“我的游戏通过向玩家介绍因式分解的概念来改变玩家,并通过让他们练习将合数分解为基本因数来建立他们对因数的熟悉度”或“我的游戏通过每天向玩家提供小而可实现的挑战来帮助他们养成日常锻炼的习惯”时,情况会更加清晰。要创造成功且有意义的转变,你必须清楚地说明你想要发生的改变,以及你的游戏如何以及为什么会促进这种改变的具体细节。真的,这是我们的老朋友,镜头#14问题陈述。当然,要创建一款成功的转型游戏,您必须想出一个可靠的解决方案来实现转型,但如果您没有明确说明需要进行什么样的转型,您就不可能做到这一点。

Possibly the most important reason to use the phrase “transformational games” is because it helps everyone remember the goal of creating the game: to transform the player. But if that is our goal, how exactly will we transform them? All too often, designers state their goal as “my game teaches math” or “my game gets people to exercise.” But those are just vague statements. They say nothing about what kind of change takes place in the player or how that change is to come about. Consider how much clearer it is when you say “my game changes players by introducing them to the concept of factoring and builds their familiarity with factors by giving them practice at breaking down composite numbers into their base factors” or “my game helps players develop a daily habit of exercise by giving them small, achievable challenges each day.” To create successful and meaningful transformations, you must clearly state the change you want to take place and also the specifics of how and why your game will foster that change. Really, this is our old friend, Lens #14: Problem Statement. Of course, to create a successful transformational game, you must come up with a solid solution to how you enable the transformation, but you can’t possibly do that until you have clearly stated what transformation needs to take place.

转型秘诀 2:找到优秀的主题专家

Transformational Tip #2: Find Great Subject Matter Experts

你可能会想,“我无法制作一款关于教消防员如何处理化学品泄漏的优秀游戏——我对此一无所知!”当然你不会。当然,你可以通过阅读几篇文章或书籍来学习一点,但有些人一生致力于了解此类主题的每一个细节,以及如何最好地将其传授给他人。找到这些人。他们通常很高兴能够将他们的专业知识带入新的维度,并渴望确保你掌握每个细节。重要的是要意识到有两种专家——一种掌握所有事实,另一种知道教授这些事实的最佳方法。如果你能与这两种专家保持一致,并学会倾听他们关于什么是重要的,什么是不重要的,那么你将在制作真正伟大的转型游戏的道路上迈出一大步。

You might think, “I can’t make a great game about teaching firefighters how to deal with chemical spills—I don’t know anything about that!” Of course you don’t. Sure, you could learn a little, by reading a few articles or books, but there are people out there who have devoted their lives to knowing every detail about a topic like that and how to best teach it to others. Find these people. They are usually thrilled to be able to take their expertise into a new dimension and eager to make sure you have every detail right. It is important to realize that there are two kinds of experts—ones that have all the facts and others that know the best ways to teach those facts. If you can align yourself with both kinds of experts and you can learn to listen to them about what is and isn’t important, you will be taking great strides toward making a truly great transformational game.

转型提示#3:教练需要什么?

Transformational Tip #3: What Does the Instructor Need?

很多时候,变革型和教育型游戏的设计者都试图创造一种体验来取代对熟练的指导员的需求。当然,这种应用有其时间和地点,例如当指导员短缺时。但变革型游戏的现实往往是,指导员会使用它们来帮助改变某人——如果是这样的话,为什么要试图取代他们呢?试图这样做只会侮辱指导员,说实话,你的指导员怎么能一个小游戏能取代教师一生的经验吗?更好的办法是弄清楚如何让你的游戏成为教师的工具。但当然,要做到这一点,你需要与教师交谈,看看他们有什么问题(再次陈述问题!)以及你的游戏如何提供帮助。通常,正如我们前面讨论的那样,教师正在寻找更好的方法来创造可教的时刻。与其试图取代教师,为什么不考虑让教师成为一种“地下城主”,可以负责一个挑战学生困难问题的场景呢?然后,你将从教师的智慧和经验中受益,更不用说他们的感激之情,因为你创造了一个工具,可以放大他们的能力,帮助他们实现你们共同的目标,即让学生变得更好。我相信,我们将看到的变革游戏有效性的最大变化之一是每个学生和老师都拥有一台标准化的联网平板电脑。一旦发生这种情况,教师可以指导学生进行多人游戏模拟的体验将突然变得可行,我预计它们将对教育产生惊人的影响。

So often, designers of transformational and educational games set out to create an experience that replaces the need for a skilled instructor. There is a time and place for that kind of application, certainly, when instructors are in short supply, for example. But often, the reality of transformational games is that they are used by an instructor to help transform someone—and if that is the case, why try to replace them? Trying to do so only will insult the instructor, and be honest, how can your little game replace that instructor’s lifetime of experience? Much better is to figure out how to make your game a tool for the instructor. But of course, to do that, you will need to talk to instructors, to see what problems they have (problem statement, again!) and how perhaps your game can help. Often, as we discussed earlier, the instructor is looking for better ways to create teachable moments. Instead of trying to replace the instructor, why not think about making the instructor a kind of “dungeon master” who can be in charge of a scenario that challenges students with difficult problems? Then you get the benefit of the instructor’s wisdom and experience, not to mention their gratitude because you created a tool that magnifies their abilities and helps them achieve your shared goal of transforming students for the better. I believe that one of the greatest changes we will see to the effectiveness of transformational games is when every student and teacher has a standardized networked tablet. Once that happens, experiences where a teacher can guide students through multiplayer game simulations will suddenly become feasible, and I expect they will have a striking effect on education.

转型秘诀#4:不要做得太多

Transformational Tip #4: Don’t Do Too Much

设定一个目标,用一款令人惊叹的万能变形游戏取代整个课程,这很诱人。通常,当你这样做时,你最终会得到一款万能的游戏。最好是选择一种关键的变形,并把它做得特别好。如果它有效并且每个人都喜欢它,他们会要求更多,然后你就可以考虑下一步应该怎么做了。大多数真正有效的变形游戏(例如PeacemakerDragon Box PlusZombie DivisionPapers Please)只追求一种变形,并专注于尽可能地做好它。

It is tempting to set a goal of replacing an entire curriculum with your amazing do-everything transformational game. And usually, when you do this, you end up with something that does everything poorly. It is much better to pick one key transformation and do that especially well. If it works and everyone likes it, they will ask for more, and then you can think about what the next steps should be. Most of the really effective transformational games (such as Peacemaker, Dragon Box Plus, Zombie Division, and Papers Please) strive for only one type of transformation and focus on doing that as well as possible.

转型秘诀 5:适当评估转型

Transformational Tip #5: Assess Transformation Appropriately

制作变形游戏最具挑战性的事情之一是了解预期的变形是否真的发生了。事实上,大多数变形游戏都是实验性的,在游戏完成之前,很难知道它们是否真的对玩家产生了预期的改变。我发现评估通常有五个级别,我按严格程度从高到低列出:

One of the most challenging things about creating transformational games is knowing whether the intended transformation actually took place. The truth is that most transformational games are experimental, and until the games are finished, it can be hard to know if they are really making the intended changes in the player. I have found there are generally five levels of assessment, which I list in ascending order of rigor:

  1. 感觉不错:这是最低级别的评估。设计师和玩家都认为“感觉”发生了一些变化。虽然这可以说比“感觉不起作用”要好,但仍然差得远。

  2. Feels like it: This is the lowest possible level of assessment. This is when the designers and players agree that it “feels like” some transformation is taking place. While this is arguably better than “feels like it’s not working,” it still isn’t much.

  3. 轶事:这是当你有一些关于人们玩你的游戏并且它显然引起了某种有用的转变的故事时。轶事可能非常鼓舞人心,在推销中听起来也不错,但它们并不能证明其有效性。

  4. Anecdotes: This is when you have some stories about situations where people played your game and it clearly caused some kind of useful transformation. Anecdotes can be very inspiring and sound good in a pitch, but they aren’t much proof of effectiveness.

  5. 主题专家 (SME) 认可:如果您拥有高质量的 SME,他们认可游戏是有效的转型工具,这非常有意义。同样,这并不能真正证明它有效,但它肯定是一个强有力的指标,表明您走在正确的道路上。

  6. Subject matter expert (SME) approval: If you have high-quality SMEs, their stamp of approval that the game is an effective tool for transformation is very meaningful. Again, it isn’t really proof that it is working, but it is certainly a strong indicator that you are on the right track.

  7. 非正式调查和评估:在游戏期间或游戏结束后进行的测试可以展示玩家的变化,这是证明您的游戏正在发挥作用的更好方法。

  8. Informal surveys and assessment: Tests either during your game or after the fact demonstrating a change in the player are an even better way to prove that your game is doing its job.

  9. 科学的测试和评估:由熟悉主题且具备足够统计数据的科学家组织进行正式的测试,以对玩家进行有意义的科学分析,这无疑是向自己证明您的游戏正在引起预期转变的理想方式。

  10. Scientific testing and assessment: Formalized testing, organized by scientists who are knowledgeable about the subject matter and who know enough about statistics to conduct meaningful scientific analysis of your players, is certainly the ideal way to prove to yourself that your game is causing the desired transformation.

当然,有意义的科学测试既耗时又费钱。不同的情况需要不同的方法。在进行转型游戏项目时,重要的是整个团队必须达成共识,了解需要多严谨才能对自己所做的事情感到满意。

Of course, meaningful scientific testing is time consuming and expensive. Different situations call for different methods. It’s important, going into a transformational games project, that the whole team be on the same page about how much rigor is necessary to feel good about what you are doing.

转型秘诀#6:选择合适的场地

Transformational Tip #6: Choose the Right Venue

还记得第 3 章场地”吗?仅仅制作游戏是不够的——您需要认真考虑玩家在玩游戏时会身处何处以及这会如何影响转变。他们会在教室里玩吗?在路上?在舒适的阅读角落?在工作台上?他们是独自一人还是与他人一起玩?他们的时间是无限的还是有限的?是否有人在那里帮助他们,还是他们独自一人?游戏的地点、方式和与谁一起玩的环境将对您是否实现转变目标产生巨大影响。

Remember Chapter 3: Venue? It isn’t enough to just make a game—you need to think hard about where your players will be when they play it and how that will affect the transformation. Will they play in the classroom? On the go? In a comfortable reading nook? In a workbench situation? Will they be alone or with others? Will they have unlimited time or a limited time window? Will anyone be there to help them, or are they on their own? The context of where, how, and with whom your game is played will make a tremendous difference in whether you meet your transformational goals.

转型秘诀7:接受市场的现实

Transformational Tip #7: Accept the Realities of the Market

我经常和那些怀揣着各种美好梦想,想要利用游戏实现各种变革目的的人交谈。但事实是,要找到一种方法将伟大的变革游戏转变为可持续的商业模式是非常困难的。一厢情愿的想法并不能让你实现这一目标——你需要清楚地了解人们愿意为哪些游戏付费,不愿意为哪些游戏付费,以及原因。如果你负担不起制作这些游戏的费用,也无法找到一种方法让需要它们的人得到它们,那么你令人惊叹的变革游戏将不会改变任何人。因此,在改变世界方面,商业头脑与出色的游戏设计同样重要。

I constantly talk to people who have all kinds of beautiful dreams about using games for all manner of transformational purpose. The truth is, though, it can be very challenging to find a way to turn great transformational games into a sustainable business model. Wishful thinking won’t get you there—what will is a clear understanding of what people will and will not pay for and why. Your amazing transformational games won’t change anyone if you can’t afford to get them made and can’t find a way to get them to the people who need them. For that reason, business savvy can be just as important as excellent game design in making a difference in the world.

游戏会对你有害吗?

Can Games Be Bad for You?

有些人害怕任何新事物。这并非毫无道理:许多新事物都是危险的。当然,游戏和玩法并不新鲜;它们自人类诞生之日起就一直存在。传统游戏也有其危险性:体育运动可能导致身体伤害,赌博可能导致经济损失,沉迷于任何消遣都可能导致生活失去平衡。

Some people are afraid of anything new. This is not unreasonable: many new things are dangerous. Games and gameplay are not new, of course; they have been around since the dawn of man. And traditional games have their dangers: sports can cause physical injury, gambling can lead to financial ruin, and obsession with any pastime can lead to a life out of balance.

但这些危险并不新鲜。它们众所周知,社会也有应对的方法。让人们(尤其是父母)感到紧张的是突然出现在流行文化中的新型游戏的潜在危险。当孩子沉迷于父母成长过程中没有接触过的东西时,父母总是会感到紧张。作为父母,这是一种不舒服的感觉,因为你不知道如何正确引导孩子,也不知道如何正确保护他们的安全。最令人担忧的两个领域是暴力和成瘾。

But these dangers are not new. They are well known, and society has methods of handling them. What makes people nervous, especially parents, are the potential dangers of new types of games that have suddenly appeared in popular culture. Parents are always nervous when their children become immersed in something that the parents did not grow up with. As a parent, it is an uncomfortable feeling, because you have no idea how to properly guide your children and no idea how to properly keep them safe. The two areas that cause the most concern are violence and addiction.

暴力

Violence

正如我们所讨论的,游戏和故事经常以暴力为主题,因为游戏和故事通常与冲突有关,而暴力行为是一种简单而戏剧性的解决冲突的方式。但没人担心国际象棋、围棋或吃豆人中发生的抽象暴力。国际象棋游戏似乎并没有激发人们去捕获现实世界的象和后。人们担心的是画面上的暴力。我亲眼目睹的一个焦点小组试图确定普通妈妈们对哪些电子游戏“过于暴力”不适合孩子的看法。“《VR 战士》还可以,”妈妈们说,“ 《真人快打》就不行。”区别是什么?血腥。让她们困扰的不是游戏中的动作(这两款游戏主要是关于踢对手的脸),而是《真人快打》中的血腥画面,而《VR 战士》中完全没有。她们似乎觉得没有流血,它就只是一款游戏——只是想象出来的。但血腥场面让这款游戏变得恐怖逼真,接受采访的妈妈们认为,一款鼓励流血的游戏让人觉得既邪恶又危险。《堡垒之夜》就是一个近期的例子,这款游戏充满了恐怖的暴力行为,但却因为没有血腥场面而通过了“妈妈测试”。

As we’ve discussed, games and stories frequently feature violent themes, because games and stories are often about conflict and violent action is a simple, dramatic way to settle a conflict. But no one worries much about the abstract violence that takes place in chess, Go, or Pac-Man. The game of chess does not seem to inspire the capture of real-world bishops and queens. Worries come about violence that is visually graphic. One focus group I witnessed was trying to determine where the average mom drew the line about what videogames were “too violent” for their kids. “Virtua Fighter was okay,” said the moms, “Mortal Kombat was not.” The difference? Blood. It wasn’t the actions that were involved in the games that bothered them (both games are mostly about kicking your opponent in the face), but rather the graphic bloodshed in Mortal Kombat that is completely absent in Virtua Fighter. They seemed to feel that without bloodshed, it was just a game—just imaginary. But the blood made the game creepily real, and to the moms in the interviews, a game that rewarded bloodshed felt perverse and dangerous. Fortnite is a more recent example of a game full of horrifically violent actions that pass “the mom test” by being blood free.

但许多游戏中没有血迹,这引起了人们的担忧。1974 年的游戏《死亡飞车》改编自电影《死亡飞车 2000》,这是一款赛车游戏,玩家撞倒动画小行人会获得奖励。当愤怒的家长开始抗议这款游戏出现在当地街机游戏厅时,发行商试图辩称动画行人不是人,而是“妖怪”,你应该开车撞倒它们。没有人相信这一点,因为鲁莽驾驶的危险太真实了。

But there have been many games without any visible blood that have raised concern. The 1974 game Death Race, based on the movie Death Race 2000, was a racing game that rewarded players for running down little animated pedestrians. When angry parents began to protest this game appearing in local arcades, the publisher tried to make the case that the animated pedestrians weren’t people, but “goblins” that you were supposed to run down with your car. No one believed that because the dangers of reckless driving are too real.

当我们第一次为 DisneyQuest 测试《加勒比海盗:海盗黄金之战》时,我们非常害怕。我们让家人参与到游戏中来游戏,他们的反应将决定游戏的未来。团队中的每个人都非常不安,因为哥伦拜恩高中枪击案发生还不到一周,而我们在这里展示的是一款游戏,玩家需要反复扣动大炮的扳机,炸毁眼前的一切。

When we did the very first test of Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold for DisneyQuest, we were terrified. We were bringing families into play the game, and their reaction was going to determine the future of the game. Everyone on the team was very uncomfortable because the Columbine high school shootings had happened less than a week before, and here we were showing a game where you pulled the trigger on a cannon, over and over, blasting everything in sight.

令我们惊讶的是,没有人将二者联系起来,所有家庭都玩得很开心。尽管我们在采访中明确询问了这个问题,但没有人对游戏过于暴力表示任何担忧。海盗大炮击落卡通船与现实世界相去甚远,因此没有引起丝毫担忧。

To our surprise, no one even made the connection, and all the families had great fun. No one expressed any concerns at all about the game being too violent, even though we expressly asked about this in our interviews. Pirate cannons shooting down cartoon ships were so far removed from the real world that it didn’t cause the slightest concern.

造成这些差异和不一致的原因是什么?原因很简单:玩带有逼真暴力内容的游戏可能会让人们对现实世界的暴力变得麻木,或者更糟的是,让他们觉得现实世界的暴力很有趣、很令人愉悦。

What accounts for these differences and inconsistencies? A simple fear: playing games with realistic violent content might make people desensitized to real-world violence or, worse, make them feel that real-world violence is fun and pleasurable.

这种担心有多大道理?很难说。我们知道,对血腥和暴力变得麻木是有可能的:医生和护士必须这样做才能在手术中正常运作并做出理性的决定。士兵和警察必须更进一步,对伤害和杀害他人变得麻木,这样他们才能在必须采取暴力行为的情况下保持清醒的思考。但这种麻木并不是父母所担心的——毕竟,如果玩电子游戏能让人们成长为更好的医生和执法官员,那就没什么可担心的了。不,对游戏暴力的担心是因为电子游戏玩家和杀人狂之间的明显相似性——毕竟,两者都是为了好玩而杀人。

How valid is this concern? It is hard to say for sure. We know it is possible to become desensitized to blood and gore: doctors and nurses must do this to function and make rational decisions during surgery. Soldiers and police officers must take it a step further and become desensitized to wounding and killing others, so they can think clearly in situations where they must commit violent acts. But this kind of desensitization isn’t what parents are worried about—after all, if playing videogames made people grow into better doctors and law enforcement officials, there wouldn’t be much cause for concern. No, the worry about game violence is about the apparent similarity between the videogame player and the murderous psychopath—after all, both kill for fun.

但是暴力游戏是否会导致这种精神变态的脱敏,还是发生了其他事情?正如我们所讨论的,人们玩游戏越多,就越能看透游戏的美学(因为暴力画面只是一种美学选择),并将他们的思想投入到游戏机制的纯粹解决问题的世界中。即使角色可能会大开杀戒,玩家通常也不会有愤怒或谋杀的想法,而是想着完善技能、解决谜题和实现目标。尽管有数百万人玩暴力主题的游戏,但很少听到有人在现实生活中被吸引去玩暴力游戏的故事。似乎普通人非常善于区分幻想世界和现实世界之间的差异。除了那些已经有暴力精神病倾向的人之外,我们大多数人似乎能够区分:我们知道游戏只是游戏。

But do violent games bring about this kind of psychopathic desensitization, or is something different happening? As we’ve discussed, the more someone plays a game, the more they see through the aesthetics of the game (for graphic violence is just an aesthetic choice) and put their minds in the pure problem-solving world of game mechanics. Even though the avatar may be going on a killing rampage, the player generally does not have thoughts of rage or murder, but thoughts of perfecting skills, solving puzzles, and accomplishing goals. Despite the millions of people who play games with violent themes, it is rare to hear a story about someone who felt drawn to act out a violent game in real life. It would seem that the average person is very good at distinguishing the difference between the fantasy world and real world. With the exception of those who already have violent psychotic tendencies, most of us seem to be able to compartmentalize: we know that a game is just a game.

但大多数人关心的不是成年人,而是仍在形成世界观的儿童和青少年。他们能安全地区分暴力游戏吗?我们知道,有些游戏他们可以。事实上,杰拉德·琼斯在他的《杀死怪物》一书中指出,一定程度的暴力游戏不仅是自然的,而且对健康的心理发展也是必要的。但肯定也有限度。有些图像和想法孩子们还没有准备好应对,这就是为什么电子游戏的分级制度是绝对必要的,这样父母才能对孩子可以玩什么做出明智的选择。

But the concern that most have is not about adults—it is about children and teenagers who are still forming their views of the world. Are they able to safely compartmentalize violent play? We know they can with some kinds of play. Gerard Jones, in his book Killing Monsters, in fact makes the case that some level of violent play is not only natural, but necessary for healthy psychological development. But surely, there are limits. There are some images and ideas that children are not yet ready to deal with, and this is why rating systems for videogames are absolutely necessary so that parents can make informed choices about what their children can play with.

那么,暴力电子游戏会让我们变得更坏吗?心理学是一门非常不完善的科学,无法给出明确的答案,尤其是对于如此新颖的东西。到目前为止,它们似乎还没有损害我们的集体心理,但作为设计师,我们必须保持警惕。技术的新进步将继续使越来越多的极端暴力游戏成为可能,也许我们会在毫无预警的情况下发现自己跨越了一条看不见的界限,进入了真正让人变得更坏的游戏。我个人认为这不太可能,但说这是不可能的,那就太傲慢和不负责任了。

So, do violent videogames change us for the worse? Psychology is too imperfect a science to give a definitive answer, especially with something so new. So far, they don’t seem to have damaged our collective psyche, but as designers, we must be on guard. New advances in technology will continue to make possible more and more extreme types of violent play, and perhaps we will, without warning, find ourselves crossing some invisible line into gameplay that really does change people for the worse. This seems unlikely to me personally, but to say that it is impossible would be arrogant and irresponsible.

Addiction

人们对游戏危害的第二大担忧是沉迷游戏,即沉迷游戏会干扰或损害生活中更重要的事情,例如学习、工作、健康和个人关系。这不仅仅是对沉迷游戏的担忧,因为毕竟任何东西(运动、西兰花、维生素 C、氧气)过量都会有害。不,这是对强迫行为的担忧,即使它显然会产生有害后果,人们也无法放弃这种行为。

The second greatest fear people have about the dangers of gaming is that of addiction, that is, playing so much that it is interfering with or damaging more important things in life, such as school, work, health, and personal relationships. This is not just a concern about too much gameplaying, because after all, too much of anything (exercise, broccoli, vitamin C, oxygen) can be detrimental. No, this is a fear about compulsive behavior that a person is unable to give up, even though it is clearly having harmful consequences.

设计师确实一直在努力创造能够吸引和吸引玩家的游戏,让你想继续玩下去。当有人对一款新游戏感到兴奋时,他们通常会称赞它:“我喜欢它!它太让人上瘾了!”但他们这样说,并不是说这款游戏正在破坏他们的生活,而是说他们感到有某种吸引力让他们不断回到游戏中。

It is true that designers do continuously seek to create games that capture and engage the mind—games that make you want to keep playing. When someone is excited about a new game, it isn’t unusual for them to compliment it by saying, “I love it! It’s so addictive!” But by this, they rarely mean that the game is damaging their lives, but rather that they feel some kind of pull to keep returning to it.

但有些人沉迷于游戏,以至于生活因此受到影响。现代大型多人游戏有着巨大的世界、社会义务和多年的游戏目标,这无疑会吸引某些人陷入自我毁灭的游戏模式。

But there are people who play games so much that their lives suffer for it. Modern massively multiplayer games, with their huge worlds, social obligations, and multiyear play goals, definitely draw certain people into self-destructive patterns of play.

值得指出的是,自我毁灭式的游戏玩法并不是什么新鲜事。赌博是一种存在已久的形式,但它是一种特殊情况,因为令人上瘾的是外生奖励,而不是内生奖励。然而,即使没有金钱奖励,人们玩游戏的时间也早已超出了应有的范围。最常见的情况是大学生。我的祖父母曾经谈论过那些因为花太多时间打桥牌而不得不辍学的同学。斯蒂芬·金的小说《亚特兰蒂斯之心》是一个故事(基于真实事件),讲述了大学生因沉迷于纸牌游戏《红心大战》而辍学,并最终被征召参加越南战争。在 20 世纪 70 年代,过度沉迷于《龙与地下城》导致学习成绩不佳,而如今《英雄联盟》对许多学生来说是一种无法控制的诱惑。

It is worth pointing out that self-destructive gameplaying is nothing new. Gambling is one form that has been around for ages, but it is a special case, since it is the exogenous, not endogenous rewards that are so addictive. Even without monetary rewards, though, there have long been cases of people playing games more than they should. The most common cases are college students. My grandparents used to talk about classmates who had to drop out of school from spending too much time playing bridge. Stephen King’s novel Hearts in Atlantis is a story (based on true events) about college students who fail out of school due to their addiction to the card game of Hearts and end up drafted into the Vietnam war as a result. In the 1970s, overplay of Dungeons & Dragons led to poor academic performance, and today League of Legends serves as an uncontrollable temptation for many students.

Nicholas Yee 对游戏“问题使用”所涉及的因素进行了非常深思熟虑的研究,他表明,不同类型的人进行自我毁灭性游戏的原因是不同的,或者正如他所说:

Nicholas Yee performed a very thoughtful study of the factors involved in “problematic usage” of games, where he shows that the reasons for self-destructive gameplay are different for different types of people or as he says:

MMORPG 成瘾问题很复杂,因为不同的玩家对游戏的不同方面、不同程度的吸引力不同,并且可能会或可能不是受外部因素的驱使,而是将游戏当作一种发泄方式。有时是游戏吸引玩家;有时是现实生活中的问题推动玩家。通常,两者兼而有之。没有一种方法可以治疗 MMORPG 成瘾,因为人们沉迷或沉迷于 MMORPG 的原因有很多。如果您认为自己沉迷于 MMORPG,并且您的游戏习惯给您带来了现实生活中的问题,或者您身边的人有沉迷和不健康的游戏习惯,请考虑寻求受过成瘾问题培训的专业顾问或治疗师的帮助。

The issue of MMORPG addiction is complex because different players are attracted to different aspects of the game, to different degrees, and may or may not be motivated by external factors that are using the game as an outlet. Sometimes the game is pulling the player in; sometimes a real-life problem is pushing the player in. Oftentimes, it is a combination of both. There is no one way to treat MMORPG addiction because there are many reasons why people become obsessed with or addicted to MMORPGs. If you consider yourself addicted to MMORPGs and your playing habits are causing you real life problems, or if someone close to you has playing habits which are obsessive and unhealthy, consider seeking the help of a professional counselor or therapist who is trained in addiction problems.

不可否认,对某些人来说,这可能是一个真正的问题。问题是“游戏设计师能做些什么?”有人认为,如果设计师不加入这些吸引人的品质,问题就会消失。但认为设计师制作“过于吸引人”的游戏是不负责任的,就像说暴饮暴食是那些不负责任的面包师的错,他们坚持让蛋糕尝起来“太美味”一样。游戏设计师有责任为他们创造的游戏体验负责,他们有责任找到让游戏结构融入平衡生活的方法。我们不能忘记这一点,也不能假装这是别人的问题。我们所有人都应该牢记这一点,就像设计师宫本茂一样,他经常在给孩子们的签名上写着:“在阳光明媚的日子,到外面玩吧。”

There is no denying that for some people, this can be a real problem. The question is, “What can game designers do about it?” Some have suggested that if the designers wouldn’t build in such attractive qualities, the problem would go away. But to suggest that it is irresponsible for designers to create games that are “too engaging” is like saying that overeating is the fault of irresponsible bakers who insist on making cake taste “too delicious.” It is incumbent upon game designers, who are responsible for the play experiences they create, to find ways to make game structures fit into a well-balanced life. We cannot forget this or pretend it is someone else’s problem. It should be on all our minds, just as it is on the mind of designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who often signs his autograph for children with the following note: “On a sunny day, play outside.”

体验

Experiences

那么,游戏会改变人吗?我们已经详细讨论过这样一个事实:我们其实不是在设计游戏,而是在设计体验。体验是唯一能够改变人的东西——有时甚至会以意想不到的方式。在创建Toontown Online时,我们创建了一个聊天系统,玩家可以通过从菜单中选择短语来快速交流。在我们看来,玩家之间的礼貌互动是Toontown美学的重要组成部分,我们认为这有助于鼓励合作游戏,因此大多数短语都是支持和鼓励的(“谢谢!”“干得好!”等)。这与标准的 MMO 文化形成了鲜明的对比,后者涉及大量垃圾话——尽可能粗鲁地侮辱与你一起玩的人。在 beta 测试期间,我们惊讶地收到了一位对我们不满的玩家的电子邮件。他解释说,他通常玩《卡米洛特的黑暗时代》 ,然后开始在业余时间玩Toontown 。然而,渐渐地,他发现自己玩Toontown 的时间越来越多,《卡米洛特的黑暗时代》的时间越来越少。他对我们生气的原因是卡通城改变了他的习惯——他发现自己不再说垃圾话,而且倾向于感谢每一个帮助过他的人。他感到很尴尬(但也勉强感激),因为一个简单的儿童游戏竟然如此轻易地操纵了他的思维模式。

So, do games change people? We have discussed at length the fact that we aren’t really designing games, we are designing experiences. And experiences are the only things that can change people—sometimes in unexpected ways. When creating Toontown Online, we created a chat system where players could communicate quickly by picking phrases off a menu. Polite interactions between players seemed to us an important part of the Toontown aesthetic, and we felt it helped encourage cooperative play, so most of the phrases are supportive and encouraging (“Thanks!” “Good job!” etc.). This was in sharp contrast to standard MMO culture, which involves a lot of trash-talking—insulting the people you play with, as rudely as possible. During beta testing, we were surprised to get an e-mail from a player who was upset with us. He explained that normally he played Dark Ages of Camelot and started playing Toontown on the side. Gradually, though, he found himself playing Toontown more and Dark Ages less. The reason he was upset with us was that Toontown had changed his habits—he found that he tended not to trash-talk anymore and was inclined to thank everyone who helped. He was embarrassed (but also grudgingly grateful) that a simple game for children had manipulated his thought patterns so easily.

你可能认为改变某人的沟通模式并不是什么大事——但回到暴力问题上,考虑一下暴力到底是什么。不是故事或游戏中的暴力,而是现实世界的暴力。在在现实世界中,暴力很少是达到目的的手段;相反,它是一种沟通方式——当其他所有方式都失败时,人们会诉诸这种方式。这是一种绝望的方式,表达“我会让你知道你伤害了我多少!”

You might think that changing someone’s communication pattern is not that big a deal—but returning to the question of violence, consider, for a moment, what violence really is. Not the violence of stories or games, but real-world violence. In the real world, violence is seldom a means toward an end; instead, it is a form of communication—one that people resort to when all else fails. It is a desperate way of saying “I’m going to show you how much you are hurting me!”

我们才刚刚开始了解游戏如何改变我们。我们必须更多地了解游戏是如何改变我们的,因为我们学得越多,我们就越能利用它们,而不仅仅是娱乐,而是改善人类状况的宝贵工具。用这个镜头来帮助你记住这个重要的想法。

We are just starting to understand how games can change us. It is imperative that we learn more about how they do, because the more we learn, the more we can use them not just as an amusement, but as a valuable tool for improving the human condition. Take this lens to help you remember this important idea.

但是,你真的应该担心你的游戏会如何改变玩家吗?这就是我们下一章的主题。

Is it really your business, though, to worry about how your game changes players? This is the subject of our next chapter.

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 《转型框架:转型游戏开发流程工具》,作者:Sabrina Haskell Culyba。这是一本全面且易于理解的指南,介绍了创建出色且有效的转型游戏的最佳实践。可通过 ETC Press 免费下载。

  • The Transformational Framework: A Process Tool for the Development of Transformational Games by Sabrina Haskell Culyba. A thorough and accessible guide to best practices for creating excellent and effective transformational games. Free download available through ETC Press.

  • 简·麦格尼格尔 (Jane McGonigal) 著《现实破碎》。这本书充满了关于游戏如何改变世界的灵感。

  • Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal. This book brims with inspiration about how games might change the world.

  • 詹姆斯·保罗·吉 (James Paul Gee) 著《电子游戏能教会我们什么关于学习和读写能力》。认真审视电子游戏的认知能力。

  • What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. A serious look at the cognitive power of videogames.

  • 学习的新传统游戏:案例书,作者:Alex Moseley 和 Nicola Whitton。本书收集了在教育环境中使用非数字游戏的教育工作者的大量案例研究。

  • New Traditional Games for Learning: A Case Book by Alex Moseley and Nicola Whitton. A great collection of case studies from educators who have used nondigital games in educational contexts.

  • Jeroen JG van Merriënboer 和 Paul A. Kirschner 著的《复杂学习的十个步骤》。系统、实用地介绍了如何创建有效的学习材料。

  • Ten Steps to Complex Learning by Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer and Paul A. Kirschner. A systematic and practical introduction to creating effective learning materials.

  • 数字游戏与学习:研究与理论,作者:Nicola Whitton。这是学习研究与转型游戏实际现实之间的完美桥梁。

  • Digital Games and Learning: Research and Theory by Nicola Whitton. An excellent bridge between learning research and the practical realities of transformational games.

第三十四

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

设计师有一定的责任

Designers Have Certain Responsibilities



34.1

FIGURE

34.1

小盒子

小盒子初具雏形

而且它的长度很短

它的宽度小,空隙小

它所拥有的一切

小盒子越来越大

现在橱柜就在里面

那是在

它变得越来越大

现在它里面有房间

还有房子、城镇和土地

以及它之前所处的世界

小盒子回忆起童年

而由于过度的渴望

又变成了一个小盒子

现在在小盒子里

整个世界是不是很小

您可以轻松地将其放入口袋中

容易偷,容易丢

照顾小盒子

—瓦斯科·波帕

The Small Box

The small box gets its first teeth

And its small length

Its small width and small emptiness

And all that it has got

The small box is growing bigger

And now the cupboard is in it

That it was in before

And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger

And now it has in it the room

And the house and the town and the land

And the world it was in before

The small box remembers its childhood

And by overgreat longing

It becomes a small box again

Now in the small box

Is the whole world quite tiny

You can easily put it in a pocket

Easily steal it easily lose it

Take care of the small box

—Vasco Popa

我之所以从事电视行业,是因为我非常讨厌它。我认为,应该有某种方式利用这一绝妙的工具来培养那些愿意观看和聆听电视的人。

—罗杰斯先生

I got into television because I hated it so. And I thought there was some way of using this fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen.

—Mister Rogers

默默无闻的危险

The Danger of Obscurity

你应该做好准备,明白作为一名游戏设计师,你不会得到太多的尊重。如果你设法找到一种专业的游戏设计方法,你可以期待很多这样的对话:

You should be prepared to understand that as a game designer, you are not going to get a lot of respect. If you manage to find a way to design games professionally, you can expect a lot of conversations like this:

朋友的朋友:那么,您做什么呢?

你:我设计电子游戏。

朋友的朋友(显然不舒服):哦……那么,就像侠盗猎车手一样?

Friend of a friend: So, what do you do?

You: I design videogames.

Friend of a friend (clearly uncomfortable): Oh… so, like that Grand Theft Auto?

这就像每个拍电影的人都会被问到:“哦……那么,你是色情电影导演吗?”

It’s the same as if everyone who makes films were asked, “Oh… so, you’re a pornographer?”

但你真的不能责怪别人。电子游戏世界里有很多耸人听闻的内容,耸人听闻的故事总是得到最多的报道。随着游戏变得越来越主流,这种情况肯定会慢慢改变。但即使情况发生了变化,成为一名游戏设计师也不再那么尴尬,它仍将是一个很难出名、出名或受人尊敬的职业。编剧也有同样的问题:人们通常不关心谁制作了他们喜欢的东西,出版商宁愿你不要出名,因为这会让你身价昂贵。但我并不是在抱怨这一点——我提到这一点只是为了指出一件非常危险的事情:因为你可以在相对默默无闻的情况下工作,所以没有人会要求你对你创造的东西负责。

But you really can’t blame people. There is a lot of lurid material in the world of videogames, and lurid stories always get the most press. Slowly, this will surely change, as games become more and more mainstream. But even as it does, and it becomes less embarrassing to be a game designer, it will continue to be a profession where it is difficult to become famous, well known, or respected. Screenwriters have the same problem: people generally don’t care who makes the things they like, and the publishers would rather you didn’t become famous anyway, because it makes you expensive. But I’m not complaining about this—I am only mentioning it to point out something quite dangerous: Because you will be able to work in relative obscurity, no one is going to ask you to take responsibility for what you create.

你可能会说,“这不是我的名字,而是出版商的名字,他们非常担心被起诉,我相信他们不会放出任何会伤害任何人的东西。”

And you might say, “It’s not my name on the line, it’s the name of the publisher, and they’re so worried about getting sued, I’m sure they won’t let anything out the door that would hurt anybody.”

但你确定吗?公司总是会犯错。而且,公司没有道德责任。当然,他们必须遵守法律,但除此之外,他们唯一的目的就是赚钱,道德与此无关,因为公司没有灵魂。银行账户是的,法律责任是的,但没有灵魂——这意味着没有道德责任。只有个人才能承担道德责任。你会认为游戏公司经理会承担这种个人责任吗?他们可能会,但你我都知道他们可能不会。不,只有一个人能为你所创造的东西负责,那就是你。

But are you sure? Corporations make mistakes all the time. And further, corporations have no ethical responsibility. Sure, they have to follow the law, but beyond that, their sole and single purpose is to generate money, and ethics don’t enter into it, because corporations have no souls. Bank accounts, yes, legal responsibility, yes, but not souls—and that means no ethical responsibility. Only individuals can take ethical responsibility. Are you going to assume that game company managers are going to take on that kind of personal responsibility? They might, but you and I know they probably won’t. No, there is only one person who can take responsibility for what you create, and that is you.

负责任

Being Accountable

第 33 章转变中,我们讨论了游戏可能存在的一些危险。随着新技术的出现,游戏也有了新的意外伤害方式。在游戏可能包含或不包含的所有危险中,对于网络游戏玩家来说,最真实、最不可否认的是遇到危险陌生人的可能性。当大多数人考虑如何让网络游戏“安全”时,他们会考虑确保儿童不会接触到粗言秽语。但尽管粗言秽语可能不合适,但它与安全无关。不,真正的危险是网络游戏可以成为匿名的面具,危险的人可以利用它来利用无辜者。如果你正在设计一款涉及陌生人之间交谈的游戏,你必须对这可能导致的结果负责。这是你在游戏设计中的选择可能导致生命被拯救或丧生的罕见情况之一。你可能认为在你的游戏中发生危险事件的几率只有百万分之一,但如果这是真的,如果你的游戏非常成功,有五百万人在玩,那么危险的事情就会发生五次。

In Chapter 33: Transform, we talked about some ways that games might be dangerous. And as new technologies arrive, there are also new ways for games to accidentally do harm. Of all the dangers that games might or might not contain, the one that is most real and undeniable for players of online games is the potential to meet with dangerous strangers. When most people think about making their online game “safe,” they think about making sure that children aren’t exposed to foul language. But while foul language may be inappropriate, it has nothing to do with safety. No, the real danger is the fact that online games can be a mask of anonymity that dangerous people can use to take advantage of innocents. If you are designing a game that involves strangers talking to each other, you must take responsibility for what that might lead to. This is one of the rare cases where your choices in game design could cause lives to be saved or lost. You might think there is a one in a million chance of something dangerous happening in your game, but if that is true, and your game is so successful that five million people play it, that dangerous thing will happen five times.

许多设计师认为他们不能为游戏中发生的事情负责,他们让律师来决定什么是安全的,什么是不安全的。但你愿意把你的道德责任交给公司律师吗?如果你不愿意为你制作的游戏承担个人责任,你就不应该制作它们。我曾参与过一个项目,团队对此深有感触,我们要求我们的概念艺术家绘制一幅图像,描绘出《时代》杂志的封面,在我们游戏中由于缺乏通信保障而导致一名儿童被绑架的那一周,封面会是什么样子。我们从未在团队之外展示过它,但我们每个人都把这幅图像刻在了脑海里,以帮助我们记住肩上的责任。

Many designers decide that they cannot be held responsible for what happens in their game, and they leave it to the lawyers to decide what is and is not safe. But are you content to leave your ethical responsibility in the hands of corporate lawyers? If you aren’t willing to take personal responsibility for the games you make, you shouldn’t be making them. I worked on one project where the team felt so strongly about this, we asked our concept artist to create an image of what the cover of Time magazine would look like the week a child was abducted due to a lack of communication safeguards in our game. We never showed it outside the team, but every one of us burned this image into our minds to help us remember the responsibility that was on our shoulders.

你的隐藏议程

Your Hidden Agenda

但你可能会说你的游戏确实是安全的——它不可能造成伤害。你可能是对的。考虑一下:你有可能找到一种方法让你的游戏做好事吗?以某种方式让人们的生活变得更好?如果你知道这是可能的,而你选择不这样做,这在某种程度上不是和制作一款伤害人们的游戏一样糟糕吗?

But you might argue that your game really is safe—there is no way it could do harm. And you might be right. Consider this: Is it possible you could find a way for your game to do good? To somehow make people’s lives better? If you know this is possible, and you choose not to do it, isn’t that, in a way, just as bad as making a game that harms people?

现在,别误会我的意思——我不是那种会告诉你游戏公司有责任改善人类,即使这意味着损失一些利润的人。游戏公司的唯一责任就是赚钱。让游戏做好事的责任完全在于你。我是说你应该试图说服管理层,如果你的游戏能以某种方式改善人类,它就会更好吗?我不是。管理层不会关心这个——他们的工作是为公司服务,而公司只关心赚钱。

Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not the type who is going to tell you that it is the responsibility of game companies to better the human race, even if it means losing some profits. The only responsibility of a game company is to make money. The responsibility for making games do good lies solely with you. Am I saying that you should try to convince management that your title will be better if it can somehow improve mankind? I am not. Management won’t care about that—their job is to serve the corporation, and the corporation only cares about making money.

我要告诉你的是,如果你愿意,你可以设计你的游戏来改善人们的生活,但你可能需要秘密地做这件事。通常,告诉管理层你使用游戏这种强大的媒介来帮助人们对你来说有多重要,这对你没有好处,因为如果他们知道这是你的目标,他们会认为你的优先事项不合理。但事实并非如此。因为如果你制作的游戏对人们来说真的很好,但没有人喜欢它(西兰花冰沙的游戏版本),那么你就没有帮助任何人。你的游戏服务人类的唯一方式是让尽可能多的人玩它们。诀窍是弄清楚你可以把什么放入你最畅销的游戏中,让玩家变得更好。你可能认为这是不可能的——人们只喜欢对他们有害的东西。但事实并非如此。人们最喜欢的一件事就是被关心。如果你能通过游戏让玩家变得更好,他们就会感受到、感激并记住那种罕见的感觉,那就是有人在乎他们成为怎样的人。

What I am telling you is that, if you want to, you can design your games so that they will improve people’s lives, but you will probably need to do this in secret. Generally, it will not serve you well to tell management about how it is important to you that you use the powerful medium of games to help people, because if they know that is your goal, they will think your priorities are out of whack. But they aren’t. For if you make a game that is really good for people, but no one likes it (the game version of a broccoli smoothie), you haven’t helped anyone. The only way your games can serve humanity is if as many people play them as possible. The trick is to figure out what you can put into your best-selling games that will transform players for the better. You might think this impossible—that people only like what is bad for them. But it isn’t true. One thing people like better than almost anything else is being cared for. And if you can manage, through your game, to make your players into better people, they will feel, appreciate, and remember that rare feeling that someone else cares what they become.

显而易见的秘密

The Secret Hidden in Plain Sight

如此多地考虑游戏对人们的影响是否有些过分?并非如此。游戏不仅仅是琐碎的娱乐。游戏是创造体验的一种方式,而生活本身也由体验组成。此外,游戏设计师创造的体验不是日常体验——而是人们实现幻想并努力成为他们一直暗暗希望成为的人的体验。为孩子们创造的幻想世界成为了现代神话——共享的故事世界将伴随他们一生,成为他们的指南针。我们创造乌托邦:所有国家都与之相比的理想社会。

Is it overkill to put this much consideration into the effect that games have on people? It is not. Games are not just trivial amusements. Games are a means of creating experiences, and life itself is composed of nothing but experiences. Moreover, the experiences that game designers create aren’t everyday experiences—they are ones where people live out their fantasies and strive to become what they have always secretly wished to be. Fantasy worlds created for children become modern mythology—shared story worlds that stay with them as a guiding compass for the rest of their lives. We create utopias: ideal societies to which all nations are compared.

仅仅考虑游戏如何影响当今的人们是不够的,我们必须考虑游戏如何影响未来的人们。你正在从事并发明一种将取代所有其他媒介的媒介。一个人年轻时沉浸其中的媒介决定了他们一生的思维方式。随着你继续发明和改进游戏媒介,你正在定义下一代人的思维过程。这不是一件小事。

It is not enough to think of how games affect people today—we must consider how they will affect people tomorrow. You are working in, and inventing, the medium that will subsume all others. The medium that a person is immersed in when they are young defines how they will think for their entire lives. As you continue to invent and improve the medium of games, you are defining the thought process of the next generation. This is no trivial matter.

如果你仔细想想,是否有任何人类活动不能被视为游戏,从而受益于良好的游戏设计原则?

When you think about it, is there any human activity that cannot be viewed as a game, and therefore benefit from the principles of good game design?

戒指

The Ring

你有没有想过你的小指?为什么它比其他手指都小?这几乎像是意外——就像某种枯萎的附属物。但事实并非如此。它有一个我们大多数人完全不知道的用途。你的小指引导你的手。每次你拿起某物或将某物放在表面上时,你的小指都会先在那里,像一根小天线一样感受东西并安全地引导手到位。

Have you ever thought about your pinky? How it is strangely smaller than all the other fingers? It almost seems like an accident—like some kind of withered appendage. But it isn’t. It has a purpose that most of us are completely unaware of. Your pinky guides your hand. Every time you pick something up or put something down on a surface, your pinky is there first, feeling things out like a little antenna and safely guiding the hand into position.

1922 年,多伦多大学邀请拉迪亚德·吉卜林 (Rudyard Kipling) 创作一种仪式,帮助提醒毕业的工程师们他们有义务帮助社会。这种庄严的仪式至今仍在举行,仪式结束时,工程师们会收到一枚铁戒指,戴在他们惯用手的小指上,作为终身提醒,提醒他们有义务帮助社会。

In 1922, Rudyard Kipling was asked by the University of Toronto to create a ritual to help remind graduating engineers of their obligation to help society. At the conclusion of this solemn ritual, still practiced today, the engineer is given an iron ring, placed on the pinky finger of their dominant hand, as a lifelong reminder of this obligation.

有一天,游戏设计师可能会编造出他们自己的义务仪式,但你没有时间等待。你的义务从今天开始——此刻。如果你真的相信游戏可以帮助人们,那么,就在这里——戴上这枚戒指。它是隐形的,就像我的一样——这样你就不会丢失它。如果你愿意接受作为游戏设计师所伴随的责任,那么你应该戴上它。戴上它是为了提醒自己让这些责任引导你的手。不过,在你戴上戒指之前要仔细考虑一下,因为它是不会掉下来的。哦——如果你仔细看,你会看到上面刻着这样一句话:

One day, game designers may concoct their own ritual of obligation, but you don’t have time to wait for that. Your obligation begins today—this minute. If you truly believe that games can help people, then, here—take this ring. It is invisible, like mine—that way, you can’t lose it. If you are willing to accept the responsibilities that go along with being a game designer, then you should put it on. Wear it as a reminder to let these responsibilities guide your hand. Think about it carefully before you put the ring on, though, because it doesn’t come off. Oh—and if you look closely, you’ll see it bears this inscription:

其他值得考虑的阅读材料

Other Reading to Consider

  • 杰拉德·琼斯的《杀死怪物》 。这是一次关于暴力游戏对儿童健康成长的必要性的精彩探索。

  • Killing Monsters by Gerard Jones. A fascinating exploration of how violent play is necessary for healthy child development.

  • 《停止教我们的孩子杀人》作者:戴夫·格罗斯曼中校和格洛丽亚·德加埃塔诺。这本备受争议但发人深省的书对暴力媒体的负面影响持极端观点。

  • Stop Teaching our Kids to Kill by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria Degaetano. This controversial but thought-provoking book takes an extreme view about the negative effects of violent media.

  • 弗雷德·罗杰斯在国会作证。这段简短的视频清楚地表明了认真对待媒介的力量。http ://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q 。

  • Fred Rogers Testifies Before Congress. This brief video makes clear the power of taking one’s medium seriously. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q.

第三十五

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

每个设计师都有一个目的

Each Designer Has a Purpose



35.1

FIGURE

35.1

最深层的主题

The Deepest Theming

在本书的开头,我们谈到了倾听是游戏设计师最重要的技能。通过这本书,我们探讨了倾听观众、游戏、团队和客户意见的各个方面。

At the start of this book, we talked about how listening is the most important skill for a game designer. And through the book, we examined facets of listening to your audience, to your game, to your team, and to your client.

但现在,是时候谈谈最重要的倾听方式——倾听自己。你可能认为倾听自己很容易。但我们的潜意识中隐藏着许多秘密。我们经常做一些事情,却不知道为什么。例如,为什么游戏设计对你如此重要?你知道吗?你可能认为这种自我反省的时间可以稍后再来。但事实并非如此,因为生命非常短暂。一眨眼,你就会抬起头来,意识到你没有时间了。因为时间会摧毁一切,带走一切。就像坡的乌鸦一样,它嘲笑你,咯咯地叫着“永不复返”,滑入黑夜。你无法阻止它。你唯一的希望就是趁现在还能做的时候完成你的重要工作。你必须像死亡就在你身后一样奔跑,因为死亡就在你身后。快点——带上这个镜头,这样你就不会忘记。

But now, it is time to talk about the most important type of listening—listening to yourself. You might think it is easy to listen to yourself. But our subconscious mind holds many secrets. We often do things, and we don’t know why. Why, for instance, is game design so very important to you? Do you know? You might think that the time for this kind of self-reflection can come later. But it can’t, because life is very short. In a blink, you will look up and realize you don’t have any time left. For time destroys everything and takes everything away. Like Poe’s raven, it mocks you, cackling “nevermore” as it glides into the night. You can’t stop it. Your only hope is to do your important work now while you still can. You must run like death is behind you because death is behind you. Quick—take this lens so you don’t forget.

但那项重要的工作是什么呢?你怎么知道呢?这就是为什么你必须学会​​倾听自己的声音。你的内心隐藏着一些重要的目的,你必须找出它是什么。当然,你不辞辛劳试图设计出伟大的游戏是有原因的。也许是因为你在脑海中看到了一些东西,你觉得这些东西会改变某人的生活。也许是因为你曾经经历过一些美妙的事情,你想与世界分享。也许你所爱的人发生了一些可怕的事情,你要确保这种事情不会再发生在任何人身上。除了你之外没有人知道这个目的,除了你之外没有人需要知道。我们谈到了如果你知道游戏的主题,你的游戏会变得多么强大,但你知道你自己的个人主题吗?你必须尽快弄清楚,因为一旦你知道了,你就会经历一个重要的创造性变化:你的有意识和潜意识的动机将会统一起来,你的工作将获得一种激情、一种专注和一种不可能更大的强度。

But what is that important work? How can you know? This is why you must learn to listen to yourself. There is some important purpose that is hidden inside you, and you must find out what it is. Surely, there is some reason you are going through all the trouble of trying to design great games. Maybe it is because you can see something in your mind’s eye that you feel will change someone’s life. Maybe it is because of something wonderful that you experienced once, and you want to share it with the world. Maybe something terrible happened to someone you loved, and you want to be sure it never happens again, to anyone. No one can know this purpose but you, and no one needs to know it but you. We spoke about how much more powerful your game will be if you know its theme, but do you know your own personal theme? You must figure it out as soon as possible, for once you know it, you will undergo an important creative change: your conscious and subconscious motivations will be united, and your work will gain a passion, a focus, and an intensity that cannot possibly be greater.

为了帮助您找到真正的动力,请使用这个最后的镜头。

To help you find your true motivation, take this final lens.

再见

Goodbye



36.1

FIGURE

36.1

一切美好的事物…

All Good Things…

不管你年龄有多大,你都不会因为太老而无法设定另一个目标或梦想一个新的梦想。

—CS 刘易斯

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

—C. S. Lewis

天哪!看看时间!我讲的时间足以写满一本书了。非常感谢您的光临——我真的很喜欢和像您这样有思想、有洞察力的人谈论这些事情。说说看,您提到的那个巧妙的字谜是什么?如果我把“游戏设计艺术”中的字母弄混了,它会拼成“ragged...”之类的?哦,是的!非常聪明!我得记住它!

My goodness! Look at the time! I’ve talked long enough to fill a whole book. Thank you so much for dropping in—I really do enjoy talking about these things with someone as thoughtful and insightful as you are. Say, what was that clever anagram you mentioned? If I mix up the letters in “art of game design,” it spells “ragged…” something? Oh, yes! Very clever! I’ll have to remember that!

你有地图吗?戒指吗?还有所有镜头吗?很好,很好。不,真的,你可以保留它们——只要你保证会使用它们。你可以在亚马逊上搜索“deck of lens”(镜头卡组)找到一副有用的镜头卡,或者在安卓或 iOS 商店中执行相同搜索下载免费的“deck of lens”(镜头卡组)应用程序。你可以在artofgamedesign.com上找到更多详细信息。如果你愿意,你可以在jesseschell.com上跟踪我的行踪。

You have your map? Your ring? And all your lenses? Good, good. No, really, you can keep them—as long as you promise to use them. You can find a helpful deck of lens cards by searching for “deck of lenses” on Amazon, or download the free “deck of lenses” app by doing the same search in the Android or iOS store. You can find more details at artofgamedesign.com. And if you want to, you can keep track of my comings and goings at jesseschell.com.

祝你玩你提到的那个游戏好运——听起来真的很有趣!什么时候可以试玩一下,告诉我!

Good luck with that game you mentioned—it sounds really fun! Let me know when we can try it out!

再次感谢您的光临,非常感谢您的聆听。保持联系,好吗?

Thanks again for stopping by, and thanks so much for listening. Keep in touch, okay?

毕竟,我们游戏设计师必须团结一致。

After all, we game designers have to stick together.

致谢

Acknowledgments

这是一个长期的项目,现在已经是第三版了,时间更长了。有许多人慷慨解囊,帮助我完成了这个项目;我知道我会想念一些人。

This has been a long project, and even longer now that it is in third edition. So many people have been kind enough to help make it come into being; I know I am going to miss some.

奈拉 (Nyra) 和艾玛 (Emma) 是我一生挚爱,她们总是鼓励我,多年来忍受着我发呆和记笔记,而这些时候我本应该去修剪草坪、洗碗或扑灭后院的火。

Nyra and Emma, the loves of my life, who always encouraged me, and put up with years of me staring into space and jotting little notes when I should have been, say, mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, or putting out that fire in the backyard.

我的母亲苏珊娜·法林格 (Susanne Fahringer) 在我十二岁的时候就意识到了龙与地下城非常非常重要。

My mother, Susanne Fahringer, who, when I was twelve, understood somehow that Dungeons & Dragons was very, very important.

我的哥哥本教我玩雷霆,这是他四岁时在梦中发明的一种纸牌游戏。

My brother, Ben, who taught me how to play Thunder, a card game he invented in a dream when he was four years old.

杰夫·麦金利,谢谢你把整只冰淇淋塞进嘴里。谢谢你忍受了我四十年。

Jeff McGinley, for putting that whole ice cream cone in his mouth. And for putting up with me for four decades.

里根·海勒 (Reagan Heller) 与我一起在无数的餐馆、飞机和会议室里工作了无数个小时,提出了卡片组上镜头图像的可视化创意,设计了卡片布局,并为本书的多个方面进行了图形设计。

Reagan Heller, who worked with me for countless hours in countless restaurants, airplanes, and meeting rooms coming up with visualization ideas for the lens images on the card deck, designed the card layouts, and did graphic design for several aspects of the book.

Kim Kiser 和 Dan Lin 抽出时间来设计第二版的封面。

Kim Kiser and Dan Lin, who somehow found time to develop the second edition cover.

Schell Games 的全体员工都给了我很好的反馈,假装不在乎我缺席会议来完成这本书。特别感谢游戏测试大师 Shawn Patton,他为游戏测试章节的改进做出了很大贡献。永远的 WUBALEW。

The entire staff at Schell Games, who gave great feedback, and pretended not to care that I was missing meetings to get the book done. Special shout out to Shawn Patton, master of playtesting, who did much to improve the playtesting chapter. WUBALEW forever.

艾玛·贝克 (Emma Backer),她负责完成《灰姑娘》的所有任务——排版卡片、协调卡片艺术家、清理和整理书籍图片、追踪版权所有者以及清理壁炉里的灰烬。

Emma Backer, who performed all the Cinderella tasks—typesetting the cards, wrangling the card artists, cleaning up and organizing book images, tracking down copyright holders, and cleaning the ashes from the fireplace.

第一版:Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann 团队,他们慷慨地将一个为期两年的项目花费了五年时间:Tim Cox、Georgia Kennedy、Beth Millett、Paul Gottehrer、Chris Simpson、Laura Lewin 和 Kathryn Spencer。

First edition: The team at Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann, who kindly let a two-year project take five years: Tim Cox, Georgia Kennedy, Beth Millett, Paul Gottehrer, Chris Simpson, Laura Lewin, and Kathryn Spencer.

第二版:泰勒弗朗西斯的团队,特别是里克亚当斯和玛莎普罗宁,让原本只需六个月的编辑工作变成了为期十八个月的彻底修改。

Second edition: The team at Taylor & Francis, especially Rick Adams and Marsha Pronin, who let what should have been a six-month editing job turn into an eighteen-month overhaul.

第三版:又是 Taylor & Francis,这次也是 codeMantra 的 Sofia Buono,还有 Rick Adams 的无比耐心,不过这次是 Jessica Vega。同样,应该是六个月,但我花了两年。还有——彩色印刷!谢谢!另外还要感谢 Josh Hendryx,他设计了时尚的橙色和蓝色新封面。

Third edition: Again Taylor & Francis, and this time Sofia Buono at codeMantra too, and again the supreme patience of Rick Adams, but now with Jessica Vega. And again, it should have been six months, but took me two years. Also—color printing! Thanks! Also also, thanks to Josh Hendryx who designed the snappy new orange and blue cover.

芭芭拉·钱伯林(Barbara Chamberlin)给予了我精神上的支持,帮助我更好地理解了游戏测试,并且耐心地忍受了项目的延迟,因为我在这个项目上花了太长时间。

Barbara Chamberlin, who gave emotional support, helped me better understand playtesting, and patiently endured delays on our project because I took so long on this one.

迪士尼 VR 工作室的每个人都多年来忍受了我漫无边际的理论胡言乱语,特别是 Mike Goslin、Joe Shochet、Mark Mine、David Rose、Bruce Woodside、Felipe Lara、Gary Daines、Mk Haley、Daniel Aasheim 和 Jan Wallace。

Everyone at the Disney VR Studio who put up with my rambling theoretical nonsense conversations for all those years, especially Mike Goslin, Joe Shochet, Mark Mine, David Rose, Bruce Woodside, Felipe Lara, Gary Daines, Mk Haley, Daniel Aasheim, and Jan Wallace.

凯瑟琳·伊斯比斯特 (Katherine Isbister),她在多方面担任我的导师,一方面因为她撰写了这一系列的第一本书《通过设计打造更好的游戏角色》,另一方面因为她在整个写作过程中为我提供了实际、技术和精神上的支持。

Katherine Isbister, who served as a mentor for me in several ways, partly by writing the first book in this series, Better Game Characters by Design, but also for giving me practical, technical, and moral support throughout the writing process.

卡内基梅隆大学娱乐技术中心的工作人员、教职员工和学生,他们慷慨地让我教授游戏设计和构建虚拟世界,这迫使我弄清楚这一切。尤其是 Don Marinelli、Randy Pausch、Brenda Harger、Ralph Vituccio、Chris Klug、Charles Palmer、Ruth Comley、Shirley Josh Yelon、Mike Christel、Scott Stevens、John Dessler、Dave Culyba、Mk Haley、Anthony Daniels、Jessica Trybus、John Wesner、Carl Rosendahl、Ji-Young Lee、Shirley Yee 和 Drew Davidson。特别感谢 Drew Davidson 的详细笔记,以及 John Dessler,他是第一个真正欣赏这本书的人。

The staff, faculty, and students of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, who graciously let me teach Game Design and Building Virtual Worlds, which forced me to figure all this out. Most especially Don Marinelli, Randy Pausch, Brenda Harger, Ralph Vituccio, Chris Klug, Charles Palmer, Ruth Comley, Shirley Josh Yelon, Mike Christel, Scott Stevens, John Dessler, Dave Culyba, Mk Haley, Anthony Daniels, Jessica Trybus, John Wesner, Carl Rosendahl, Ji-Young Lee, Shirley Yee, and Drew Davidson. Special thanks to Drew Davidson for his detailed notes, and to John Dessler, who was the first person to truly appreciate the book.

兰迪·波许值得我双重感谢,因为他的神奇视角让他看到了我能做到,而当时我还不相信自己能做到。谢谢你,兰迪。

Randy Pausch deserves a double thank-you, for his magical lens that let him see that I could do this when I didn’t believe that I could. Thanks, Randy.

尾注

Endnotes

你好

Hello

第 xxxiii 页— 马克斯韦尔·H·布洛克 (Maxwell H. Brock):罗杰·科曼 (Roger Corman) 经典电影《一桶血》(A Bucket of Blood ) (1959 年)中的角色。

Page xxxiii—Maxwell H. Brock: A character in Roger Corman’s classic film, A Bucket of Blood (1959).

第 xxxix 页— 我们不妨忽略对大自然的研究,因为她已经古老了。

Page xxxix—We might as well omit to study nature because she is old.

—亨利·戴维·梭罗,《瓦尔登湖》

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

第 1 章:设计师

Chapter 1: Designer

第 2 页—“当必须尝试做某事时,绝不能考虑可能性或不可能性。” 我从 CS 刘易斯 (CS Lewis) 的《返璞归真》 ( Mere Christianity)中借用了这句话。

Page 2—“When a thing must be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility.” I borrowed this phrase from C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.

第 2 页—“他们不惧怕嘲笑。”卡里·埃文斯向我指出。

Page 2—“They lack a fear of ridicule.” Pointed out to me by Cary Evans.

第 3 页—“‘动画’的意思是‘赋予生命’。”感谢 Ben Johnson 提醒我这一点!

Page 3—“‘Animation’ means ‘to give life’.” Thanks to Ben Johnson for reminding me of that!

第 5 页—“Brian Moriarty 曾经指出…”他在 1997 年 GDC 演讲“听着!共享幻觉的可能性”中说过这句话。这个词源学存在一些疑问。

Page 5—“Brian Moriarty once pointed out…” He said this in his 1997 GDC lecture called “Listen! The Potential for Shared Hallucinations.” There is some doubt about this etymology.

第 6 页—“用一颗静默的心去聆听...”赫尔曼·黑塞,《悉达多》。1922 年。

Page 6—“To listen with a silent heart…” Herman Hesse, Siddhartha. 1922.

第二章:经验

Chapter 2: Experience

第 13 页—“心理学、人类学和设计”。我很惊讶地发现其他资料也支持这一三元组。乔治·桑塔亚那在《美感》一书中提出了类似的三元组,即心理学家、人类学家和艺术家。马克·普伦斯基在《基于数字游戏的学习》一书中谈到了通往知识的三条道路:“分析道路,哲学家反思、调解和理解物体和事件;经验道路,科学家操纵变量并进行受控实验以验证可靠的原理;务实道路,实践者应对现实世界的挑战并提出有效和高效绩效的策略。”分析对应于人类学,经验对应于心理学,务实对应于设计。

Page 13—“Psychology, Anthropology, and Design.” I was surprised to find this triad reinforced by other sources. George Santayana, in The Sense of Beauty, forms a similar triad of psychologist, anthropologist, and artist. Marc Prensky, in Digital Game Based Learning, talks about the three paths to knowledge: “The analytical path, where philosophers reflect, mediate, and make sense of objects and events; the empirical path, where scientists manipulate variables and conduct controlled experiments to validate reliable principles; and the pragmatic path where practitioners struggle with real-world challenges and come up with strategies for effective and efficient performance.” Analytical corresponds to anthropology, empirical to psychology, and pragmatic to design.

第 11 页— 鱼漫画由里根·海勒 (Reagan Heller) 提供。

Page 11—Fish cartoon courtesy Reagan Heller.

第 15 页—“Xenophilic” 如果您愿意,您也可以说“xenophilous”。

Page 15—“Xenophilic” You can also say “xenophilous,” if you like.

第 16 页—“例如,苏格拉底指出...”柏拉图的《斐多篇》。

Page 16—“Socrates, for example, noted…” Plato’s Phaedo.

第 16 页—“……在对体验的质量做出结论时,我们可以满怀信心地信任自己的感觉和本能。”GK 切斯特顿的一句话与此相关:“一个人只有成为天文学家才能理解天文学;他只有成为昆虫学家(或者,也许是昆虫)才能理解昆虫学;但仅仅作为一个人,他就能理解大量人类学。他自己就是他所研究的动物。因此出现了一个在民族学和民间传说记录中随处可见的事实 — — 同样的冷漠和超脱的精神导致天文学或植物学研究的成功,也导致神话学或人类起源研究的灾难。为了公正地对待微生物,必须不再是人;但为了公正地对待人类,没有必要不再是人。同样的,对同情心的压制、对直觉或猜测的抛弃,使得一个人在处理蜘蛛的胃时显得异常聪明,但也会使他在处理人心时显得异常愚蠢。”(摘自 GK 切斯特顿的《科学与野蛮人》,载于《异教徒》)

Page 16—“…we can confidently trust our feelings and instincts when making conclusions about the quality of an experience.” A quote from G.K. Chesterton is relevant here: “A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps, an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of ethnology and folk-lore - the fact that the same frigid and detached spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of man.” (From “Science and the Savages” by G.K. Chesterton, in Heretics.)

第 18 页—“他根本没法清楚地剖析自己的经历。”是的,杰夫,这就是你。

Page 18—“He simply was not able to clearly dissect his experiences.” Yes, Jeff, this is you.

第 19 页—“击败海森堡” 本·约翰逊 (Ben Johnson) 建议进行另一类自省:寻找自己第一次沉浸在游戏中的时刻。

Page 19—“Defeating Heisenberg” Ben Johnson suggests another category of introspection: Looking for the first time that you get swept up in your game.

第 19 页—“该原理参考了海森堡不确定性原理...”感谢 Benjamin Landorff 帮助措辞,让挑剔的物理学爱好者不那么恼火。

Page 19—“This principle, in reference to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle…” Thanks to Benjamin Landorff for helping to wordsmith this in a way that is less annoying to picky physics nerds.

第三章:场地

Chapter 3: Venue

第 26 页— 感谢 Dan Burwen 对本章的启发,也感谢我的 Facebook 好友的讨论!

Page 26—Thanks to Dan Burwen for inspiring this chapter and thanks to my Facebook friends for discussing it!

第四章:游戏

Chapter 4: Game

第 36 页—“我认为没有人会不同意这一点。”实际上,Bernard Mergen 会在几页后不同意。明白我所说的没有共识是什么意思了吧?

Page 36—“I don’t think anyone will disagree with that.” Actually, Bernard Mergen will in a couple of pages. See what I mean about no consensus?

第 37 页—“参与者接受了糖水喷雾……” Berns, GS、SM McClure、G. Pagnoni 和 PR Montague。“可预测性调节人类大脑对奖励的反应。” 《神经科学杂志》 2001 年 4 月 15 日,21(8),2793–2798。

Page 37—“participants received sprays of sugar water…” Berns, G.S., S.M. McClure, G. Pagnoni, and P.R. Montague. “Predictability modulates human brain response to reward.” Journal of Neuroscience April 15, 2001, 21(8), 2793–2798.

第 38 页—“这是一个棘手的问题。”我并不是唯一这么认为的人。看看这个:“游戏的本质长期以来一直困扰着哲学家和心理学家。” Trevarthen,C. 婴儿期,心灵。在《牛津心灵指南》中。牛津大学出版社,牛津,英国,2004 年,第 460 页。

Page 38—“This is a tricky one.” I’m not the only one who thinks so. Check this out: “The nature of … play has long baffled philosophers and psychologists.” Trevarthen, C. Infancy, mind in. In The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., 2004, p. 460.

第 38 页—“游戏是指那些活动……” Gilmore, JB 游戏:一种特殊行为。《儿童游戏》Herron, RE 和 B. Sutton-Smith (eds.) John Wiley & Sons,纽约,1971 年,第 311 页。

Page 38—“Play refers to those activities…” Gilmore, J.B. Play: A special behavior. In Child’s Play, Herron, R.E. and B. Sutton-Smith (eds.) John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1971, p. 311.

第 38 页—“游戏是在更严格的结构内自由活动。”Salen, K. 和 E. Zimmerman。《游戏规则》。麻省理工学院出版社,马萨诸塞州剑桥,2004 年,第 304 页。

Page 38—“Play is free movement within a more rigid structure.” Salen, K. and E. Zimmerman. Rules of Play. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, p. 304.

第 39 页—“游戏是自发进行的任何活动,并且是为了游戏本身的目的。” 桑塔亚那,G.《美的感觉》。Charles Scribner's Sons,纽约,1896 年,第 19 页。

Page 39—“Play is whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake.” Santayana, G. The Sense of Beauty. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1896, p. 19.

第 39 页—“游戏,有赢家或输家的竞争性游戏……” Mergen,B. Play and Playthings。Greenwood Publishing Group,康涅狄格州韦斯特波特,1983 年。

Page 39—“Games, competitive games, which have a winner or a loser…” Mergen, B. Play and Playthings. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT, 1983.

第 39 页—“在每一项必须完成的工作中……”Sherman, RM 和 Sherman, RB 的《一勺糖》摘自《欢乐满人间》 。华特迪士尼影业,1964 年。

Page 39—“In ev’ry job that must be done…” Sherman, R.M. and Sherman, R.B. Spoonful of Sugar” from Mary Poppins. Walt Disney Pictures, 1964.

第 39 页—“他必须完成的任务…” Csikszentmihalyi,M. Flow。Harper & Row,纽约,1990 年,第 39 页。

Page 39—“The task he has to perform…” Csikszentmihalyi, M. Flow. Harper & Row, New York, 1990, p. 39.

第 40 页—“工作和娱乐……变得等同于奴役和自由。” 桑塔亚那,G.《美的感觉》。纽约多佛出版社,1955 年,第 19 页。

Page 40—“Work and play … become equivalent to servitude and freedom.” Santayana, G. The Sense of Beauty. Dover, New York, 1955, p. 19.

第 40 页—“这是所有游戏的不变原则...” Carse, JP有限和无限游戏。Ballantine Books,纽约,1986 年,第 4 页。

Page 40—“It is an invariable principle of all play…” Carse, J.P. Finite and Infinite Games. Ballantine Books, New York, 1986, p. 4.

第 41 页—“许多人试图定义‘游戏’。”在《游戏规则》7 章中,Salen 和 Zimmerman 对提出的许多定义进行了出色的分析,我在此不再重复。毫不奇怪,这些定义几乎没有达成共识。

Page 41—“many people have tried to define ‘game.’” In Chapter 7 of Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman have done an excellent analysis of the many definitions that have been put forth, which I will not repeat here. Not surprisingly, the definitions reach little consensus.

第 41 页—“游戏是自愿控制系统的练习...” Avedon, E. 和 B. Sutton-Smith。(编辑)《游戏研究》。John Wiley & Sons,纽约,1971 年,第 405 页。

Page 41—“Games are an exercise of voluntary control systems…” Avedon, E. and B. Sutton-Smith. (eds.) The Study of Games. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1971, p. 405.

第 42 页—“[游戏] 是一种具有内生意义的交互式结构...” Costikyan,G.《我无话可说,但我必须设计。》(第 2 版),第 24 页。

Page 42—“[A game is] an interactive structure of endogenous meaning…” Costikyan, G. I Have No Words, and I Must Design. (version 2), p. 24.

第 44 页—“然而,这些点没有任何用处……”或者,如果它们有其他用途,我永远也想不通!

Page 44—“However, the points serve no purpose…” Or, if they had some other purpose, I could never figure it out!

第 44 页—“游戏是一个封闭的、正式的系统...” Fullerton,T.、C. Swain 和 S. Hoffman。游戏设计研讨会。CMP 图书,加利福尼亚州旧金山,2004 年,第 37 页。

Page 44—“A game is a closed, formal system…” Fullerton, T., C. Swain, and S. Hoffman. Game Design Workshop. CMP Books, San Francisco, CA, 2004, p. 37.

第 45 页—“Johan Huizinga 称其为‘魔圈’” Johan Huizinga,Homo Ludens

Page 45—“Johan Huizinga called it ‘the magic circle’” Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens.

第 49 页—“关于游戏的全部真相...”Lehman 和 Witty,《游戏心理学》第 1 章,1927 年。

Page 49—“The whole truth regarding play…” Lehman and Witty, Psychology of Play, Chapter 1, 1927.

第 5 章:元素

Chapter 5: Elements

第 52 页—“当她四处寻找新物体时……”她最终难倒了我:“爸爸,羽毛是由什么构成的?”(答案:“角蛋白。”)

Page 52—“As she looked around for a new object…” She did eventually stump me: “Daddy, what are feathers made of?” (The answer: “keratin.”)

第 55 页—“……很难让人们相信这四个元素是平等的。”我曾在一次讲座上介绍过四要素,一位学生向我提出挑战:“我听过皮克斯动画师的一次讲座,他们坚持认为‘在皮克斯,故事是第一位的,故事是最重要的。’你是说这在游戏中不是真的吗?”我回答说,这不仅在游戏中不是真的,在皮克斯也不是真的。皮克斯团队选择制作《玩具总动员》是因为塑料玩具的故事是任何人都能讲述的最好的故事吗?不——他们之所以选择它,是因为他们当时的技术阻碍了他们讲述关于人类的引人入胜的故事。然而,他们可以渲染塑料玩具。所以,在这种情况下,技术是第一位的,然后故事被用来支持它,就像所有伟大的事物一样,不同的元素都相互支持。

Page 55—“…it is hard to get people to believe in the equality of the four elements.” I presented the tetrad at a lecture once, and a student challenged me: “I heard a lecture from Pixar animators, where they insisted that ‘At Pixar, story comes first, story is most important.’ Are you saying that is not true in games?” I answered that not only is it not true in games, it is not true at Pixar. Did the Pixar team choose to make Toy Story because a story about plastic toys would be the best story anyone could tell? No—they chose it because their technology at the time prevented them from telling compelling stories about human beings. Plastic toys, though, they could render. So, in that case, technology came first, but then story was used to support it, and as with all great things, the different elements all supported each other.

第 56 页—“……入侵军队的速度越快。”维基百科的注释:“速度变化在一波开始时很小,但在结束时却非常显著。这一动作最初是游戏编写方式的无意结果 — 由于程序需要移动的外星人越来越少,因此运行速度越来越快,但在获得开发团队的青睐后被保留了下来。”感谢 Ben Johnson 指出这一点!

Page 56—“…the faster the invading army gets.” A note from Wikipedia: “The change in speed was minor at the beginning of a wave, but dramatic near the end. This action was originally an unintentional result of the way the game was written—as the program had to move fewer and fewer aliens it ran faster and faster, but was kept after finding favour with the development team.” Thanks to Ben Johnson for pointing it out!

第 6 章:主题

Chapter 6: Theme

第 63 页—“迪士尼 VR 工作室” 该团队曾经是华特迪士尼幻想工程的一部分,但后来并入了迪士尼在线工作室。

Page 63—“The Disney VR Studio” This team used to be part of Walt Disney Imagineering, but was merged into Disney Online Studios.

第 64 页—“Yo ho,yo ho,我的海盗生活。”“Yo Ho(我的海盗生活)”。X. Atencio 和 George Bruns,1967 年。

Page 64—“Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.” “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life For Me).” X. Atencio and George Bruns, 1967.

第 66 页—“一位风趣的绅士……” 那是 Greg Wiatroski。还有谁?

Page 66—“One witty gentleman…” It was Greg Wiatroski. Who else?

“…演员…”这是迪士尼用来代替“员工”的术语。

“…the cast member…” This is the term Disney uses instead of “employee.”

第68页—“这部电影深深地感动了观众……”感动了观众,并收获了6亿美元的票房。

Page 68—“This film deeply moved audiences…” Moved them to the point of collecting $600 million at the box office.

第 68 页—“当斯蒂芬·金写作他著名的小说《魔女嘉莉》时...”斯蒂芬·金在他优秀的著作《论写作:写作技巧的回忆录》 (第 195-200 页)中详细地谈到了这一点。

Page 68—“When Stephen King was writing his famous novel Carrie…” Stephen King talks about this in some detail in his excellent book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (pages 195–200).

第 7 章:理念

Chapter 7: Idea

第 74 页—“……我的杂耍技巧仅限于两种……”反向层叠和“爪子”。我都是从卡洛的《杂耍书》中学到的。

Page 74—“…my repertory of tricks was limited to two…” Reverse cascade and “the claw.” I learned them both from The Juggling Book by Carlo.

第 78 页—“…在四元组的哪些部分?” (1) 技术。“棋盘游戏”和“磁铁”已经确定。 (2) 故事。 (3) 美学 — 但要小心 — 这款游戏需要让人感觉像一幅超现实主义绘画。它需要看起来像一幅吗? (4) 机制。你可能会说是技术,但也许改进是使用新技术。

Page 78—“…in what parts of the tetrad?” (1) Technology. “Board game” and “magnets” have already been decided. (2) Story. (3) Aesthetic—but be careful—this game needs to feel like a surrealist painting. Does it need to look like one? (4) Mechanics. You might say technology, but perhaps an improvement would be to use a new technology.

第 81 页—“有一位缪斯女神……” King, S. 《论写作》。Scribner,纽约,2000 年,第 144-145 页。

Page 81—“There is a muse…” King, S. On Writing. Scribner, New York, 2000, pp. 144–145.

第 86 页—“漫画家 Lynda Barry 坚持…” Lynda Barry。这是什么

Page 86—“Cartoonist Lynda Barry insists…” Lynda Barry. What It Is.

第 88 页—“拯救鲸鱼!收集整套!”感谢兰迪·尼尔森(又名阿廖沙·卡拉马佐夫)的这个笑话。

Page 88—“Save the whales! Collect the whole set!” Thanks to Randy Nelson, AKA Alyosha Karamazov, for this joke.

第 90 页—“…雅典娜般…”阅读你的神话!

Page 90—“…Athena-like…” Read your mythology!

第 92 页—“……大多数团体进行头脑风暴的方式都是错误的。”请参阅乔纳·莱勒在2012 年 1 月 30 日的《纽约客》上发表的“群体思维:头脑风暴的神话” 。

Page 92—“…most groups go about brainstorming all wrong.” See “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth” by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker, January 30, 2012.

第 8 章:迭代

Chapter 8: Iteration

第 96 页—“最佳猜测。苏鲁先生。”这是对《星际迷航》的嘲讽。

Page 96—“Best guess. Mr. Sulu.” That’s a nerdy Star Trek reference.

第 101 页—“…撰写该论文的温斯顿·罗伊斯…”罗伊斯,W.《管理大型软件系统的开发:概念和技术》,WESCON 会议论文集,IEEE 计算机学会出版社,洛斯阿拉米托斯,加利福尼亚州,1970 年。

Page 101—“…Winston Royce, who wrote the paper…” Royce, W. Managing the development of large software systems: Concepts and techniques, Proceeding WESCON, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1970.

第 102 页—“…Barry Boehm 提出了一个不同的模型…”Boehm,B. 软件开发和增强的螺旋模型,ACM SIGSOFT 软件工程笔记,1986 年 8 月。

Page 102—“…Barry Boehm presented a different model…” Boehm, B. A spiral model of software development and enhancement, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, August 1986.

第 103 页—“...螺旋模型的许多后代...”其中一些是 Scrum、ROPES 和喷泉模型。

Page 103—“…many descendants of the spiral model…” Some of them are Scrum, ROPES, and the fountain model.

第 111 页—“…你可以快速完成所有事情!”富勒顿、斯温和霍夫曼合著的《游戏设计工作室》一书中的第 7 章:原型设计提供了制作纸质原型的极好技巧。

Page 111—“…you can do it all lightning fast!” Chapter 7: Prototyping, in the book Game Design Workshop by Fullerton, Swain, and Hoffman has excellent tips for making paper prototypes.

第 113 页—“游戏设计师大卫·琼斯...”这些引述来自他在 2001 年 DICE 大会上的演讲。

Page 113—“Game Designer David Jones…” These quotes are from a talk he gave at DICE 2001.

第 118 页—“…从未完成——只会被抛弃。”Paul Valery 这样评价诗歌,但这也适用于游戏设计。

Page 118—“…never finished—only abandoned.” Paul Valery said this about poetry, but it is certainly true of game design as well.

第 118 页—“…Mark Cerny…”“方法” Cerny 是从动作类平台游戏的角度来谈论的。对于其他类型的游戏,您需要自己确定“两个可发布级别”的等价含义。http ://www.gamasutra.com/features/slides/cerny/index.htm

Page 118—“…Mark Cerny…”“The Method” Cerny is speaking from a reference point of action-based platform games. For other types of games, you need to determine for yourself what the equivalent of “two publishable levels” means. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/slides/cerny/index.htm.

第 9 章:玩家

Chapter 9: Player

第 123 页—“如果你正在为目标受众创建游戏……” 一些成年人很难记住某个年龄段的童年是什么样的。如果你问别人“你八岁时最喜欢的书是什么?”他们通常会一无所获。如果你问“你三年级时最喜欢的书是什么?”他们就更容易记住了。如果你的情况如此,那么请学习这个简单的规则:将年龄转换为年级,只需减去五。这样,当有人问“什么样的游戏适合 10-12 岁的孩子?”时,你可以通过思考你和你的朋友在五年级、六年级和七年级喜欢什么来自动唤起你的记忆。

Page 123—“If you are creating a game for a target audience…” Some adults have a hard time remembering what childhood was like at a certain age. If you ask someone “What was your favorite book when you were eight years old?” they often draw a blank. If you instead ask “What was your favorite book when you were in the third grade?” they can more easily remember. If this is the case for you, then learn this simple rule: to convert from age to grade, just subtract five. That way, when someone says “What kind of game is good for 10–12-year olds?” you can automatically access your memories by thinking about what you and your friends liked in 5th, 6th, and 7th grades.

第 126 页—《彼得潘和温迪》引言:出自 2003 年的电影《彼得潘》

Page 126—Peter Pan and Wendy quote: From the 2003 Peter Pan movie.

第 128 页—“……男性的空间推理能力通常强于女性……” Hilmar Nordvik、Benjamin Amponsah。“平等教育体系中大学生的空间能力和空间能力的性别差异”,《性别角色:研究杂志》,1998 年 6 月。http ://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_n11-12_v38/ai_21109782

Page 128—“…males generally have stronger skills of spatial reasoning than females…” Hilmar Nordvik, Benjamin Amponsah. “Gender differences in spatial abilities and spatial ability among university students in an egalitarian educational system,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, June 1998. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_n11-12_v38/ai_21109782.

第 128 页—Heidi Dangelmeier 语录:引自 Beato, G. 1997。“女孩玩的电脑游戏不再是矛盾的。”Electrosphere,5.04,4 月。http ://www.wired.com/wired/archive5.04/es_girlgames-pr.html

Page 128—Heidi Dangelmeier quote: Quoted in Beato, G. 1997. “Computer Games for Girls Is No Longer an Oxymoron.” Electrosphere, 5.04, April. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive5.04/es_girlgames-pr.html.

第 128 页—“所售出的所有小说中有 1/3 是浪漫小说” http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_novel

Page 128—“1/3 of all fiction books sold are romance novels” http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_novel.

第 128 页—“... 《龙腾世纪:审判》的女性玩家数量比一般的动作角色扮演游戏还多...” https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre /。

Page 128—“… Dragon Age: Inquisition has more female players than the average action RPG…” https://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/.

第 130 页—“孩之宝 Pox 的设计者……” Tierney,J。“Alpha Pups 来了。”《纽约时报》,2001 年 8 月 5 日。

Page 130—“The designers of Hasbro’s Pox…” Tierney, J. “Here Come the Alpha Pups.” New York Times, August 5, 2001.

第 133 页—“勒布朗的游戏乐趣分类法” 该分类法在 Robin Hunicke、Marc LeBlanc 和 Robert Zubek 合著的《MDA:游戏设计和游戏研究的形式化方法》中进行了介绍。Greg Costikyan 合著的《我无话可说,但我必须设计》中对此进行了更详尽的解释。

Page 133—“LeBlanc’s Taxonomy of Game Pleasures” The taxonomy is introduced in “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research” by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek. It is explained more thoroughly in “I Have No Words and I Must Design” by Greg Costikyan.

第 10 章:玩家心态

Chapter 10: Player’s Mind

第 140 页—“考虑这种模式” 摘自 Jaynes, J.《双腔心智崩溃中的意识起源》。纽约多佛出版社,1976 年,第 40 页。

Page 140—“Consider this pattern” Borrowed from Jaynes, J. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Dover, New York, 1976, p. 40.

第 144 页—“一种完全集中精力的感觉...” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

Page 144—“a feeling of complete and energized focus…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29.

第 144 页— 本·约翰逊 (Ben Johnson) 对心流的注释:一些 EA 体育游戏通过让角色在“心流”状态下做出超人的事情来创造“虚拟心流”。

Page 144—A note on flow from Ben Johnson: some EA sports titles create “virtual flow” by letting avatars do things that are superhuman when in a “flow” state.

第 11 章:动机

Chapter 11: Motivation

第 154 页—“亚伯拉罕·马斯洛写了一篇论文…”马斯洛,A. 人类动机理论。《心理学评论》, 50,370–396。

Page 154—“Abraham Maslow wrote a paper…” Maslow, A. A theory of human motivation. In Psychological Review, 50, 370–396.

第 154 页— 关于马斯洛需求层次理论的注释:有趣的是,即使在游戏中,层次结构也发挥作用 - 我的首要任务是让我的角色生存下来,等等。

Page 154—A note on Maslow’s hierarchy: It is interesting that the hierarchy is at work, even within the game—my first priority is to make my character survive, etc.

第 155 页—“Edward Deci 和 Richard Ryan 的作品与游戏特别相关...”如果您想了解有关这项工作的更多信息,维基百科关于自我决定理论的文章是一个很好的起点。

Page 155—“Particularly relevant to games is the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan…” The Wikipedia article on self-determination theory is a good place to start, if you would like to learn more about this work.

第 157 页—“一些心理学家试图说明……”我通过与 Scott Rigby 的对话开发了这个特殊的图表。

Page 157—“Some psychologists have tried to illustrate…” I developed this particular diagram via conversations with Scott Rigby.

第 157 页—“在一项著名的研究中,两组儿童被要求画画。” 您可以在阿尔菲·科恩 (Alfie Kohn) 所著的《奖励下的惩罚》一书中阅读有关此内容的更多信息。

Page 157—“In one famous study, two groups of children were asked to draw pictures.” You can read more about this in the book Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn.

第 158 页—“我正在读一本关于神经科学的书……”它是克林格尔巴赫和贝里奇所著的《大脑的乐趣》 。

Page 158—“I was reading a book about neuroscience…” It was Pleasures of the Brain, by Kringelbach and Berridge.

第 159 页—“……尝试将每一个放在一个矩阵上……”这个正交矩阵是我自己的想法(没有人需要承担责任),但我在 Sebastien Deterding 和 Scott Rigby 的帮助下对其进行了改进。

Page 159—“…try putting each one on a matrix…” This orthogonal matrix was my own idea (no one else need take blame), but I refined it with help from Sebastien Deterding and Scott Rigby.

第 161 页—“每个成功的游戏都是新奇与熟悉的结合。”我曾听 Bing Gordon 参观 ETC 时说过这句话,这句话一直萦绕在我的脑海里。

Page 161—“Every successful game is a mix of the novel and the familiar.” I heard Bing Gordon say this when he visited the ETC once, and it stuck with me.

第 12 章:游戏机制

Chapter 12: Game Mechanics

第 173 页—“控制时间”。如果没有 Dan Stubbs 的帮助,我根本不会想到这一部分。

Page 173—“Controlling Time.” This section would not have occurred to me if not for the helpful Dan Stubbs.

第 177 页—“……全部都是关于猜测对手的私人属性的状态。”想象一下,如果您不知道哪些地产上有房屋和酒店,大富翁游戏会有多么不同(可能的练习)。

Page 177—“…all about guessing the states of your opponent’s private attributes.” Imagine how different Monopoly would be if you did not know which properties had houses and hotels on them, for instance (possible exercise).

第 177 页—“Celia Pearce 指出了另一种信息...” Celia, P.互动书。MacMillan Technical Publishing,印第安纳波利斯,印第安纳州,1997 年,第 423 页。

Page 177—“Celia Pearce points out another kind of information…” Celia, P. The Interactive Book. MacMillan Technical Publishing, Indianapolis, IN, 1997, p. 423.

第 183 页—“…导致文字冒险游戏失宠。”这个想法是菲利普·萨尔兹曼在一篇为我在卡内基梅隆大学的游戏设计课撰写的论文中向我提出的。

Page 183—“…caused text adventures to fall from favor.” This idea was suggested to me by Phillip Saltzman, in an essay he wrote for my game design class at Carnegie Mellon.

第 184 页—Parlett 规则分析:David Parlett,《Rules OK》。http ://www.davpar.com/gamestar/rulesok.html

Page 184—Parlett’s Rule Analysis: David Parlett, Rules OK. http://www.davpar.com/gamestar/rulesok.html.

第 184 页—“基本规则”:Zimmerman 和 Salen 称其为“构成性规则”(《游戏规则》,第 130 页)。David Parlett 更喜欢使用“基本规则”这一术语,我也是。“不成文规则”:Steven Sniderman。不成文规则。http ://www.gamepuzzles.com/tlog/tlog2.htm

Page 184—“foundational rules”: Zimmerman and Salen call these “constituative rules” (Rules of Play, page 130). David Parlett prefers the term “foundational rules,” as do I. “Unwritten Rules”: Steven Sniderman. Unwritten Rules. http://www.gamepuzzles.com/tlog/tlog2.htm.

第 185 页—“考虑玩《铁拳 5》的这些锦标赛规则...”这些是 2005 年 Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) 的规则。

Page 185—“Consider these tournament rules for playing Tekken 5…” These were rules from the 2005 Penny Arcade Expo (PAX).

第 186 页—“席德·梅尔提出了一条极好的经验法则”:席德·梅尔。三次辉煌的失败。DICE 2001(视频)。

Page 186—“Sid Meier proposes an excellent rule of thumb”: Sid Meier. Three Glorious Failures. DICE 2001 (video).

第 202 页—“……哪些方格最常被选中?” 最常被选中的方格前三名依次为伊利诺伊大道、GO 和 B&O 铁路。Brady,M.大富翁游戏书。David McKay 公司,纽约,1975 年,第 92 页。 不要忘记模拟中的机会卡和社区宝箱卡!

Page 202—“…which squares are landed on most frequently?” The top three most frequently landed on squares, in order, are Illinois Avenue, GO, and the B&O Railroad. Brady, M. The Monopoly Book. David McKay Company, New York, 1975, p. 92. Don’t forget the Chance and Community Chest cards in your simulation!

第 205 页— 特沃斯基名言摘自:威廉·F·奥特曼。《用统计学和人性确定风险》。《巴尔的摩太阳报》,1985 年 10 月 13 日,第 50 页。

Page 205—Tversky quote found in: William F. Altman. “Determining Risks with Statistics—and with Humanity.” Baltimore Sun, October 13, 1985, p. 50.

第 206 页—“特沃斯基要求人们估计各种原因发生的可能性……”摘自 Bernstein,PL Against the Gods:The Remarkable Story of Risk。John Wiley & Sons,纽约,1996 年,第 279 页。他从特沃斯基的一篇论文中摘录了这段话。

Page 206—“Tversky asked people to estimate the likelihood of various causes…” Taken from Bernstein, P.L. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996, p. 279. He took it from a paper by Tversky.

第十三章:平衡

Chapter 13: Balance

第 212 页“实力悬殊的战斗不会带来欢乐。”正如南希·布雷利斯 (Nancy Brelis) 所著的《木乃伊市场》中凯沃尔夫人所说。

Page 212 “There is no joy in an unequal battle.” As Mrs. Cavour stated in The Mummy Market by Nancy Brelis.

第 217 页—“异形大战铁血战士”感谢 James Portnow 提供这个不同寻常的例子。

Page 217—“Alien vs. Predator” Thanks to James Portnow for this unusual example.

第 221 页—“Michael Mateas 指出…” 互动戏剧、艺术和人工智能 2002。Mateas,M。博士论文。技术报告 CMU-CS-02–206,卡内基梅隆大学计算机科学学院,宾夕法尼亚州匹兹堡。2002 年 12 月。

Page 221—“Michael Mateas points out…” Interactive Drama, Art, and Artificial Intelligence 2002. Mateas, M. PhD thesis. Technical Report CMU-CS-02–206, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. December 2002.

第 222 页—“三角性” 我第一次听到这个词是在 Chris Crawford 的书《电脑游戏设计艺术》中。他使用它的方式与我略有不同。

Page 222—“Triangularity” I first heard this word in Chris Crawford’s book, The Art of Computer Game Design. He uses it in a somewhat different way than I do.

第 236 页—“暴雪的游戏《暗黑破坏神》就是一个很好的例子...”摘自比尔·罗珀在 2004 年 DICE 大会上的演讲“奖励玩家的好处”。

Page 236—“One great example from Blizzard’s game Diablo…” from a talk called “Benefits of Rewarding Gamers” that Bill Roper gave at DICE 2004.

第 238 页—“似乎已经达到了完美...”摘自安蒂奥内·德·圣埃克苏佩里的《风、沙和星星》 。

Page 238—“It seems that perfection is reached…” from Wind, Sand and Stars by Antione de Saint Exupery.

第 14 章:谜题

Chapter 14: Puzzles

第 252 页—“年轻的 Chris Crawford 曾大胆宣称...” Crawford,C。《计算机游戏设计艺术》。Osborne/McGraw Hill,加州伯克利,1984 年,第 7 页。

Page 252—“A young Chris Crawford once made the bold statement…” Crawford, C. The Art of Computer Game Design. Osborne/McGraw Hill, Berkeley, CA, 1984, p. 7.

第 253 页—“拼图很有趣,而且有一个正确答案。”什么是拼图?http://www.scottkim.com/thinkinggames/whatisapuzzle/index.html

Page 253—“A puzzle is fun, and has a right answer.” What is a Puzzle? http://www.scottkim.com/thinkinggames/whatisapuzzle/index.html.

第 256 页—“考虑一下 Sam Loyd 著名的 15 谜题...”当然,Sam Loyd 实际上并没有发明这个谜题,但他成功地将其功劳据为己有超过一个世纪,正如Jerry Slocum 和 Dic Sonneveld 在《15 谜题》中所解释的那样。

Page 256—“Consider Sam Loyd’s famous 15 puzzle…” Of course, Sam Loyd did not actually invent this puzzle, but he successfully took credit for it for over a century, as explained in The 15 Puzzle, by Jerry Slocum and Dic Sonneveld.

第 258 页—“研究表明,明显的进步...”请参阅 Teresa M. Amabile 和 Steven J. Kramer 合著的《小胜利的力量》,《哈佛商业评论》,2011 年 5 月。

Page 258—“Research shows that visible progress…” See “The Power of Small Wins” by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, Harvard Business Review, May 2011.

第 15 章:界面

Chapter 15: Interface

第 270 页—“有时,虚拟层太薄,以至于不存在……”喜欢希腊语的人将虚拟界面称为“叙事界面”,这是从声音设计领域借用而来。“叙事”音效和音乐由观众听到,但电影中的角色听不到。虚拟界面是一个很好的类比。

Page 270—“Sometimes, the virtual layer is so thin as to be non-existent…” People who like Greek words call virtual interface “diegetic interface,” which is borrowed from the world of sound design. “Diegetic” sound effects and music heard by the audience, but not by the characters in the film. Virtual interface is a good parallel.

第 280 页—“juicy”:我第一次听到这个术语是在 CMU 的实验游戏研究团队中:Kyle Gabler、Kyle Gray、Matt Kucic 和 Shalin Shodhan。他们制作了许多 juicy 游戏。

Page 280—“juicy:” I first heard this term from the Experimental Gameplay research team at CMU: Kyle Gabler, Kyle Gray, Matt Kucic, and Shalin Shodhan. They made many juicy games.

第 16 章:利率曲线

Chapter 16: Interest Curves

第 298 页—“那是当地一家游乐园的表演团。”事实上,那是马萨诸塞州阿格瓦姆的河滨公园,现在是六旗新英格兰。我的命运与那个公园紧密相连——我的祖父母在 1930 年代第一次在那里见面。哦——那是保罗·奥斯本的表演团。

Page 298—“It was a show troupe at a local amusement park.” In fact, it was Riverside Park, in Agawam, MA, which is now Six Flags New England. My destiny is tangled up in that park—my grandparents first met there back in the 1930s. Oh—and it was a Paul Osborne show troupe.

第 303 页—“阿拉丁魔毯虚拟现实体验的 Mark 2 版本”。尽管在本文印刷时 Mark 3 版本可以在奥兰多的 DisneyQuest 游玩,但 Mark 2 版本已于 1997 年关闭。

Page 303—“Mark 2 version of Aladdin’s Magic Carpet virtual reality experience.” Though the Mark 3 version is playable at DisneyQuest in Orlando at the time of this printing, the Mark 2 version was shut down in 1997.

第 304 页—“《半条命 2》是有史以来最受好评的游戏之一。” Metacritic 评分 96 — 还不错。http ://www.metacritic.com

Page 304—“Half Life 2, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.” Metacritic score of 96—not too shabby. http://www.metacritic.com.

第 304 页—“...玩家死亡人数图表...”来自http://www.steampowered.com/stats/ep1/

Page 304—“…graph of the number of player deaths…” From http://www.steampowered.com/stats/ep1/.

第 17 章:故事

Chapter 17: Story

第 324 页—“你怎么能把《罗密欧与朱丽叶》变成一场游戏呢……”我和克里斯·克劳福德讨论了这个想法,他开玩笑地说,也许上帝让我们的宇宙无法进行时间旅行,是为了确保我们的决定有意义。我仍然在夜里辗转难眠,思考着这件事。

Page 324—“How could you make a game out of Romeo and Juliet…” I was discussing this idea with Chris Crawford, and he jokingly suggested that perhaps God made time travel impossible in our universe to ensure that our decisions meant something. I still lie awake at night thinking about this.

第 324 页—“……确实很聪明。” MMO 没有保存点,因此没有时间旅行。因此,最动人、最戏剧性的游戏体验很可能来自该媒介。

Page 324—“…has to be clever indeed.” MMOs do not have save points—and therefore have no time travel. It may well be that the most moving and dramatic gameplay experiences will thus come from that medium.

第 333 页—“正如鲍勃·贝茨所说:”摘自《走进森林:英雄之旅实用指南》。

Page 333—“As Bob Bates puts it:” From Into the Woods: a Practical Guide to the Hero’s Journey.

第 338 页—“……当我停在金银岛地图上时……” 《写作的艺术》,罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森著,第 5 章

Page 338—“…as I paused on my map of Treasure Island…” The Art of Writing, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Chapter 5.

第18章:间接控制

Chapter 18: Indirect Control

第 345 页—“……尽管我用各种巧妙的方法来限制他们的选择……”有关更多信息,请参阅 Sheena Iyengar 的演讲:https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose

Page 345—“…despite my tricky methods of constraining their choices…” For more information see this talk by Sheena Iyengar: https://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose.

第 349 页—“但是艺术总监有了一个想法。”那是加里·戴恩斯 (Gary Daines)。

Page 349—“But then the art director had an idea.” That was Gary Daines.

第 353 页—“餐馆一直使用这种方法……”Areni, CS 和 Kim, D。“背景音乐对购物行为的影响:葡萄酒商店中的古典音乐与四十大热门音乐,”消费者研究进展,1993 年,第 20 卷,第 336-340 页。关于音乐对购物行为影响的更多研究。

Page 353—“Restaurants use this method all the time…” Areni, C.S., and Kim, D. “The influence of background music on shopping behavior: Classical versus top-forty music in a wine store,” Advances in Consumer Research, 1993, 20, 336–340. Additional research on the influence of music on shopping behavior.

第 354 页—“…玩一次这个游戏只需 20 美元。” DisneyQuest 最初支持“按次付费”模式,可选择“一次付费”模式。从长远来看,“一次付费”模式胜出。

Page 354—“…$20 just to play this game one time.” DisneyQuest originally supported a “pay per ride” model, with the “pay one price” model being optional. The “pay one price” model won out in the long run.

第 355 页—“…我们绘制了一张初步地图。”动画总监 Bruce Woodside 绘制了这张地图。

Page 355—“…we drew up an initial map.” Animation Director Bruce Woodside drew the map.

第 359 页—“中国哲学家老子写道……”出自《道德经》。

Page 359—“The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote…” from the Tao Te Ching.

第 19 章:世界

Chapter 19: Worlds

第 363 页—“所有 Pokémon 产品的总销售额” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises

Page 363—“the combined sales of all Pokémon products combined” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises.

第20章:人物

Chapter 20: Characters

第 379 页—“……一份精简的、概括人物性格的特征清单。”大卫·弗里曼 (David Freeman) 因倡导这种方法而闻名,他称之为“人物钻石”。

Page 379—“…a small, distilled list of traits that encapsulate the character.” David Freeman is well known for championing this approach, which he calls the “character diamond.”

第 380 页—“这个复杂的图表...”摘自Katherine Isbister 所著的《更好的游戏角色设计》,第 26 页。

Page 380—“This complex diagram…” From Better Game Characters by Design by Katherine Isbister, p. 26.

第 385 页—“流浪汉:“哎呀!你要去哪儿?”即兴创作,作者:Keith Johnstone,第 36 页。

Page 385—“TRAMP: ‘Ere! Where’ are you going?” Impro, by Keith Johnstone, p. 36.

第 388 页—“我们也是唯一会脸红的动物……”或者说,正如马克·吐温所指出的,我们需要脸红。

Page 388—“We are also the only animal that blushes…” Or needs to blush, as Mark Twain points out.

第 388 页—“……唯一会哭的动物。”有人说大象也会哭。可能是因为这些笑话。

Page 388—“… the only animal that cries.” Some say that elephants cry too. Probably because of all these jokes.

第 391 页夜色温柔。我略微编辑了这段文字,以便看得更清楚。对不起,妮可。

Page 391Tender is the Night. I edited the passage slightly for clarity. Sorry, Nicole.

第 21 章:空间

Chapter 21: Spaces

第 400 页—“想象一下自己在一个冬日的午后……” Christopher Alexander。《永恒的建筑之道》,第 32-33 页。

Page 400—“Imagine yourself on a winter afternoon…” Christopher Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building, pp. 32–33.

第 403 页—“在最深邃的中心...” Alexander,C.《生命现象》,第 222 页。

Page 403—“In the most profound centers…” Alexander, C. The Phenomenon of Life, p. 222.

第 405 页图 21.2由 Ernest Adams 提供。

Page 405Figure 21.2 courtesy of Ernest Adams.

第 408 页—“……由 Max Payne 的设计师首创……”Aki Maatta 为 Max Payne 设计的现实关卡设计。http ://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020508/maatta_01.htm

Page 408—“…pioneered by the designers of Max Payne…” Realistic Level Design for Max Payne by Aki Maatta. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020508/maatta_01.htm.

第 409 页—“……魔鬼在细节中。” 其他人说上帝在细节中。坦率地说,我开始怀疑他们是同一个人。

Page 409—“…the devil is in the details.” Others say that God is in the details. Frankly, I’m beginning to suspect they are the same guy.

第22章:存在

Chapter 22: Presence

第 418 页—“我们的大脑中有一个特殊的细胞核,负责注意靠近我们身体的物体。” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/debate-2016-what-goes-on-in-your-brain-when-people-invade-your-personal-space/

Page 418—“We have a special nucleus in our brain that is responsible for paying attention to objects that come close to our bodies.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/debate-2016-what-goes-on-in-your-brain-when-people-invade-your-personal-space/.

第 422 页—“……在 Randy Pausch 对迪士尼阿拉丁魔毯 VR 冒险的研究中……”该研究名为“迪士尼阿拉丁:迈向虚拟现实讲故事的第一步”,Pausch 等人,1996 ACM-0-89791-746-4/96/008。

Page 422—“… in Randy Pausch’s study of Disney’s Aladdin Magic Carpet VR Adventure…” the study was called “Disney’s Aladdin: First Steps Toward Storytelling in Virtual Reality,” Pausch et al., 1996 ACM-0-89791-746-4/96/008.

第 420 页—“…当连接的耳机数量超过一千万时。”我的观察是,当世界上有千万个耳机时,你的朋友中可能就有一个拥有一个,这样社交网络就成为可能。我预计我们将在 2022 年或更早达到这一数字。

Page 420—“…when the number of connected headsets rises over ten million.” My observation is that when there are ten million of something in the world, probably one of your friends has one, thus making social networking possible. I expect we will reach this number by 2022 or sooner.

第23章:美学

Chapter 23: Aesthetics

第 434 页—“远山”。感谢 Ted Elliot 提供此报道。http ://www.ugo.com/ugo/html/article/ ?id516210 §ionId588。

Page 434—“distant mountains.” Thanks to Ted Elliot for this story. http://www.ugo.com/ugo/html/article/?id516210&sectionId588.

第24章 其他玩家

Chapter 24: Other Players

第 440 页—“一小时的游戏比一年的谈话更能让你了解一个人。”这句话经常被归为柏拉图的名言,据说是《理想国》的文本的一部分。但老实说,我在那里找不到这句话。

Page 440—“You can learn more about a man in an hour of play than a year of conversation.” This is frequently attributed to Plato and said to be part of the text of the Republic. Honestly, though, I can’t find it in there.

第 25 章:社区

Chapter 25: Communities

第 444 页—“两位心理学家试图更好地理解……” McMillan DW 和 DM Chavis,1986 年。“社区意识:定义和理论”,第 16 页。

Page 444—“Two psychologists who set out to better understand…” McMillan D.W. and D.M. Chavis, 1986. “Sense of community: A definition and theory,” p. 16.

第 444 页—“Amy Jo Kim 对社区的简洁定义...” Kim, AJ,《网络社区建设》,第 28 页。

Page 444—“Amy Jo Kim’s succinct definition of community…” Kim, A.J. Community Building on the Web, p. 28.

第 451 页—“像《模拟人生》《天际》这样的游戏...”感谢 Humberto Cervera 指出《天际》作为例子。

Page 451—“Games like The Sims and Skyrim…” Thanks to Humberto Cervera for pointing out Skyrim as an example.

第 455 页—“Xbox One 上的 2K14 会被判技术犯规...”感谢 Mark Tomczak 提供的提示。

Page 455—“2K14 on Xbox One gives technical fouls…” Thanks for Mark Tomczak for this tip.

第26章:团队

Chapter 26: Team

第 462 页—“把它想象成……一款针对目标受众的游戏。”当然,你应该一直都是这么想的!

Page 462—“think of it as… a game for the intended audience.” This is how you should have been thinking all along, of course!

第 463 页—“你可能会对自己内心开始发生的转变感到惊讶。”我从 CS Lewis 的《返璞归真》中得到了这个想法。

Page 463—“You may be surprised at the transformation that starts to take place within yourself.” I got this idea from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

第 468 页—“如果你向一个平庸的群体提出一个好主意……” http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/pixar-020707.html

Page 468—“If you give a good idea to a mediocre group…” http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/pixar-020707.html.

第 27 章:文档

Chapter 27: Documents

第 472 页— Jason Vandenberghe 引言:来自个人信件。

Page 472—Jason Vandenberghe quote: from personal correspondence.

第 474 页— Rich Marmura 引言:来自个人信件。

Page 474—Rich Marmura quote: from personal correspondence.

第 28 章:游戏测试

Chapter 28: Playtesting

第 487 页— 引用 Curt Bererton 的私人信件内容。

Page 487—Quote from Curt Bererton from personal correspondence.

第 491 页—“……如果你使用五点量表……”如果你想让自己听起来知道自己在说什么,这种量表通常被称为李克特量表。大多数人将其发音为 Like-urt,但李克特博士将其发音为 Lick-urt,所以基本上这是发牌者的选择。也许我们应该让人们按从一到五的等级对这两种发音进行评分。

Page 491—“…if you use a five point scale…” This kind of scale is generally called a Likert scale, if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about. Most people pronounce it Like-urt, but Dr. Likert pronounced it Lick-urt, so basically it is dealer’s choice. Maybe we should ask people to rate the two pronunciations on a scale from one to five.

第 495 页— 引用 Barbara Chamberlin 在其演讲“努力制作不糟糕的游戏”中的话。https ://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=qx6lpeaUPSc 。

Page 495—Quote from Barbara Chamberlin from her talk “Trying Very Hard to Make Games that Don’t Stink.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx6lpeaUPSc.

第 29 章:科技

Chapter 29: Technology

第 500 页—“……六个月前发布的另一部米奇动画片。”怎么,你不相信我?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse

Page 500—“…another Mickey cartoon that was released six months earlier.” What, you don’t believe me? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Mouse.

第 503 页—“没人知道它到底是什么样子,但每个人都说它很棒。”如果你想唱有关炒作周期的歌,这是 They Might Be Giants 演唱的有关炒作周期的歌曲“The Spiraling Shape”中的一句歌词。

Page 503—“Nobody knows what it’s really like, but everyone says it’s great.” This is a line from the song about the Hype Cycle called “The Spiraling Shape” by They Might Be Giants, in case you want to, you know, sing about the Hype Cycle.

第30章:客户

Chapter 30: Client

第 517 页—“佛罗伦萨,1498 年。”我最喜欢的米开朗基罗故事可以在罗伯特·格林和约斯特·埃尔弗斯合著的《权力的 48 条法则》中找到。

Page 517—“Firenze, 1498.” My favorite telling of the Michelangelo story can be found in The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers.

第 31 章:音调

Chapter 31: Pitch

第 523 页—“0.083 美元” 当然,这个价格很便宜。

Page 523—“$0.083” That’s a dime a dozen, of course.

第32章:利润

Chapter 32: Profit

第 537 页—“当消费者购买一款售价 50 美元的零售游戏时...”数据来自 Kathy Schoback 所著的《游戏产业角色和经济学》,载于《游戏开发简介》,由 Steve Rabin 编辑,2005 年,Charles River Media,第 862 页。

Page 537—“When a consumer buys a $50 retail game title…” Data from “Game Industry Roles and Economics” by Kathy Schoback in Introduction to Game Development, edited by Steve Rabin, 2005, Charles River Media, p. 862.

第 543 页—“一项研究发现,50% 的游戏收入来自 0.15% 的玩家。” http://landingpage.swrve.com/0114-monetization-report.html

Page 543—“One study found that 50% of game revenue comes from 0.15% of players.” http://landingpage.swrve.com/0114-monetization-report.html.

第33章:蜕变

Chapter 33: Transform

第 551 页— “最近的研究表明脑力锻炼有益于健康...”例如,http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/articles/2006/rebok_mentalexercise.html 。

Page 551—“Recent studies have shown the health benefits of mental exercise…” http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/articles/2006/rebok_mentalexercise.html, for example.

第 551 页—“有些人认为教育是严肃的……”这些人通常会被语义所安抚:虽然他们可能发现“娱乐游戏”是不可接受的,但他们通常认为“参与模拟”是一种有价值的工具——同样的东西,不同的名称。

Page 551—“Some hold the position that education is serious…” These people are often assuaged by semantics: while they may find “entertaining games” unacceptable, they often consider “engaging simulations” a valuable tool—same thing, different name.

第 552 页—“高中校长的平均年龄为 49 岁,数据来源于http://nces.ed.gov。”

Page 552—“The average high school principal is 49 years old data from http://nces.ed.gov.”

第 554 页—“百丈欲遣僧……”《无门之门》,作者:荣海,又名:无门,译者:Nyogen Senzaki 和 Paul Reps [1934]。

Page 554—“Hyakujo wished to send a monk…” The Gateless Gate, by Ekai, called Mu-mon, tr. Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps [1934].

第 554 页—“米勒学习金字塔...” Miller, GE,《临床技能/能力/表现评估》。《学术医学》 1990 年,第 63-67 页。

Page 554—“Miller’s pyramid of learning…” Miller, G.E. The assessment of clinical skills/competence/performance. Academic Medicine 1990, S63–S67.

第 555 页—“……用线性媒介来传达复杂的关系系统是非常非常困难的方式。” 例如,写这本书并不是一件轻松的事!

Page 555—“…a linear medium is a very, very difficult way to convey a complex system of relationships.” Writing this book, for example, was no picnic!

第 555 页—“Impact Games 的《和平缔造者》” http://www.peacemakergame.com

Page 555—“Peacemaker from Impact Games” http://www.peacemakergame.com.

第 563 页—“问题使用”在技术上比“成瘾”更为正确,因为“成瘾”具有具体的医学定义。

Page 563—“problematic usage” a more technically correct term than “addiction,” which has a specific medical definition.

第 563 页—“Nicholas Yee 进行了一项非常深思熟虑的研究...”“Ariadne—了解 MMORPG 成瘾”作者:Nicholas Yee,2002 年 10 月(http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/home.html)。

Page 563—“Nicholas Yee performed a very thoughtful study…” “Ariadne—Understanding MMORPG Addiction” by Nicholas Yee, October 2002 (http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/home.html).

第34章:职责

Chapter 34: Responsibilities

第 568 页—“罗杰斯先生” 要了解有关这位迷人男士的更多信息,我建议观看 2018 年的电影《你愿意做我的邻居吗》

Page 568—“Mister Rogers” To learn more about this fascinating man, I suggest watching the 2018 film Won’t You Be My Neighbor.

第 571 页—“1922 年,鲁德亚德·吉卜林被问及...” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an_Engineer

Page 571—“In 1922, Rudyard Kipling was asked…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ritual_of_the_Calling_of_an_Engineer.

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指数

INDEX